Laguna agate

Most of the agate images on the website are made from Brazilian material. Recently, however, I decided to venture into the more expensive world of collector-quality specimens, amongst which Mexican agates loom large. Most come from Chihuahua, the largest of Mexico’s thirty-one states and reputedly home of the eponymous, diminutive breed of dog. Mexican agates were first documented in 1895, but it wasn’t until some fifty years later that a few American collectors, travelling a newly constructed highway, found small agate nodules close to the road. They are now commercially mined and prized by collectors and jewellery makers worldwide.
With the exception of the celebrated Crazy Lace Agate, which is featured on the cover of the Formations book that is for sale on the website and forms in cracks of an older Cretaceous limestone, Mexican agates are found in volcanic rocks from 38 to 44 million years old. Each variety is named after a nearby ranch, hacienda, or – like the Laguna agate shown here – a railway station. Laguna agates are famed for their fine colour banding and the exquisitely delicate detail shown above is an enlargement of an area only 1cm (3/8”) wide. It was bought from the website Beautiful Agates and happily, given its tiny size, required minimal ‘cleaning’.