Natural
Turquoise

Drawn from the ancient copper-rich deposits of the Sonoran Desert, this turquoise carries the colors of the American Southwest — vivid blues and greens woven through with the distinctive matrix patterns that make each stone utterly unique. It forms deep underground where rainwater meets copper and aluminum in the desert rock, a process that takes millions of years to produce what you hold in your hand.

The Sonoran mines sit at Campitos Mountain near Cananea, Mexico — just 35 miles south of the Arizona border, in a region that has yielded turquoise for over two thousand years. The Aztecs, the Ancestral Puebloans, and the Native peoples of the Southwest wore and revered this stone long before Europeans arrived. Turquoise artifacts from these civilizations date to at least 200 B.C., making it one of the oldest gemstones in continuous human use.

The color tells you what's inside: copper gives the prized robin's-egg blue, while traces of iron push the hue toward green. The web of veining through each stone — known as the matrix — ranges from delicate spiderweb patterns to bold dark lines, and no two stones share the same. The finest Sonoran turquoise is naturally hard enough to take a high polish without treatment — a mark of true gem-grade material.

At Hemmingmoore's, we carry natural, untreated Sonoran turquoise — rough, polished cabochons, and loose stones — plus select original turquoise jewelry.