Last year, when Roberto Ruiz visited the Carbonera mine in Querétaro, Mexico, he cracked open a grapefruit-size piece of rhyolite with a hammer. When he looked inside, “it was like finding a fire fossil,” he said during a recent phone interview from his home in San Antonio. Inside was an orangey-red fire opal that he likened to a flame, forever preserved in the sphere of igneous rock.
Mr. Ruiz and his wife, Erika Rodriguez, are among the few people who have traveled to the mine, a desolate spot located in Carbonera in central Mexico, a destination that’s well off the beaten tourist track, some 20 miles from the nearest city. Their journey was especially unusual as neither is in the gem trade: Mr. Ruiz is a corporate attorney and Ms. Rodriguez works in digital marketing.
But they are among a growing number of travel enthusiasts seeking unusual, hyper-specific vacation experiences that offer an insider’s view of the gem and fine jewelry industries, and a number of businesses are responding to the demand accordingly.
Mr. Ruiz said the idea of visiting an opal mine was appealing for a few reasons, starting with his lifelong fascination with gemstones and minerals.
The mine’s remote location in the rocky, semidesert wilderness (where snakes and scorpions are not uncommon) was also compelling: Ms. Rodriguez said she and her husband are usually inclined toward travel focused on outdoor adventure, from hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru to rock climbing around Krabi in southern Thailand.
“We had also gone to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and saw an opal from Querétaro, and Roberto is originally from there,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “We found out something that we didn’t even know existed and we became interested in learning how the opals are extracted — and meeting the people who were doing it.”
