Colombian Emeralds Tour

We start the Emerald Tour at the Parque Santander, where you can see several landmark buildings of Bogota, including the former building of the El Tiempo newspaper, the Bank of the Republic, the Gold Museum and the churches of San Francisco, La Veracruz and La Tercera. There, we will travel up to the 23rd floor of the Avianca Building, an architectural landmark of contemporary Bogota, to enter the Museo Internacional de la Esmeralda, where we will visit a 27 square meter tunnel with samples of the emerald deposits and real veins extracted from the mines of Boyac. Here we will be able to appreciate the process of working with emeralds, from its extraction in the mines to the carving and handcraft of jewelry making, which we will see live in the museum workshop. The collection showcases unique emeralds from Colombia such as the Fuego Ferde (Green Fire) and Trapiche emerald, known for its strange shape of a star. After that, we will walk to the Carrera Septima and Avenida Jimenez, the center of the emerald market in town. Our path towards the Plazoleta del Rosario will let us experience informal traders who are buying and selling emeralds on the streets daily where you will learn the importance of acquiring stones at authorized and reliable stores. This route will take us to the Eje Ambiental and the commercial center for emeralds with the largest number of organized shops in Bogota. Then we enter the Emerald Trade Center, a building with local and export business offices. Finally, we will walk to La Candelaria, to finish our tour at the Galera de Artesanas y Esmeraldas de Colombia, a place where we will be received with a cup of Colombian coffee and you will enjoy crafts from all over the country. There you will discover the makeup of emeralds and learn to recognize original stones and their value according to their color, clarity and carat weight. At the end of the day we will have seen natural rough emeralds originated millions of years ago, jewelry in silver, yellow and white gold as well as other other precious stones.