There are flights from Dubai to Tanzania and then onto Pemba, on Mozambique’s northern coast – where a tiny airport and convoluted entry process highlight the area’s limited number of tourist arrivals – and then a lengthy drive that takes us through acres of untamed land, past abandoned colonial-era buildings and villages made of mud huts. Getting to the mine is no easy task, of course. “They are comparable with the legendary ‘pigeon blood’ rubies of Myanmar, which frequently command the highest price per carat of any coloured gemstone,” says Sen. To boot, some of the rubies found here are of a quality previously only thought possible in gemstones from Myanmar. “Although the deposit was only discovered in 2009, the rubies at the Gemfields Montepuez deposit have been established as approximately 500 million years old.” “Montepuez Ruby Mine covers over 33,000 hectares, making it the world’s largest ruby deposit,” explains Rupak Sen, director of marketing and sales, Asia and Middle East, for Gemfields, which owns a 75 per cent stake in the mine. Lauded as the most significant ruby-deposit discovery of recent times, about 50 per cent of the world’s ruby supply now comes from this mine. I am with a group of journalists in Mozambique’s northeastern Cabo Delgado Province, at the Montepuez Ruby Mine.
I get to a handful before becoming steadily distracted by the magnitude of it all. We play a somewhat novel game – who can collect the most stones in the space of a few minutes – but it’s too easy. They sit in among the dirt, throwing up glints of red and pink. In the Maninge Nice pit, the ground is literally littered with rubies.