Qualla: Coromandel, Minas Gerais

Coromandel, Minas Gerais: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kiran.atten, CC BY-SA 3.0. On August 13, 1938, two garimpeiros named Joaquim Venancio Tiago and Manoel Miguel Domingues were working the gravels of the Santo Antonio do Bonito, a modest river in the western Minas Gerais cerrado, when they lifted out a stone weighing 726.6 carats. Nothing that large had ever come out of Brazilian ground, and nothing has since. They named it for the sitting president, Getulio Vargas. It passed through several hands - a Belo Horizonte broker, then a Dutch banking syndicate - before Harry Winston, the New York jeweler, won it at auction for roughly seven hundred thousand dollars, and within a few more years it had been cleaved and cut into twenty-nine separate gems. The town it came from is called Coromandel, and eighty-seven years later people there are still finding diamonds in the creeks.

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Image: Kiran.atten | CC BY-SA 3.0

Coromandel, Minas Gerais: Twenty-Nine Stones From One

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gustyofwind, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cutting the Presidente Vargas was an act of destruction as much as craft. The rough stone had flaws running through it, and the only way to get clean gems out was to cleave it apart. What emerged was a set of twenty-nine finished diamonds totaling 411.06 carats - sixteen emerald ...

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Image: Gustyofwind | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coromandel, Minas Gerais: Why They Are Here at All

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gustyofwind, CC BY-SA 4.0. Diamonds form under enormous pressure deep in the mantle and reach the surface only when a particular kind of volcanic eruption carries them up, freezing them into pipes of rock called kimberlite. The Coromandel district is riddled with them - hundreds of kimberlite bodies scatte...

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Image: Gustyofwind | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coromandel, Minas Gerais: Still Finding Them

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quilt Phase, CC BY-SA 3.0. The year after the Presidente Vargas came the Darcy Vargas, 460 carats, also from Coromandel. Then decades of smaller stones, steady enough that residents here talk about diamonds the way people elsewhere talk about the harvest. And then, in May 2025, on the banks of the Rio Dour...

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Image: Quilt Phase | CC BY-SA 3.0

Coromandel, Minas Gerais: A Name From the Other Side of the World

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gustyofwind, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nobody in town agrees on where the name came from. The older explanation, still repeated locally, ties it to the Coromandel Coast of southeastern India and to ships that carried enslaved people from there - though this is difficult to sustain, since the people enslaved in Brazil ...

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Image: Gustyofwind | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coromandel, Minas Gerais: Coffee, Limestone, and Cattle

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gustyofwind, CC BY-SA 4.0. For all the attention the stones attract, the everyday economy of Coromandel rests on agriculture. This is cerrado coffee country, growing beans for export on the corrected red soils of the plateau, alongside broad plantations of soybeans and corn. Dairy farms supply processing p...

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Image: Gustyofwind | CC BY-SA 4.0