Proustite

specimen number:
2062475

location:
San Genaro Mine, Santa Ana, Castrovirreyna, Huancavelica, Peru

description:
Collected in the late 1980s, attractive red translucent crystals of proustite measuring to 2.0 cm in size on matrix. The larger crystal on the left side of the piece as you look at the specimen shows some natural contacting along one edge. This is not damage. These have always been quite rare for this country, this is a good one.

The San Genaro Mine, located in the Castrovirreyna mining district of Huancavelica, Peru, traces its regional mining history back to Spanish colonial discovery in 1591, with operations evolving through various modern corporate reopenings and intermittent production phases before shifting into formal closure and environmental planning stages in the early 2010s. Geologically, the deposit is situated within the Andean Cordillera's Mio-Pliocene metallogenic belt, where low-sulfidation epithermal quartz veins cut through Tertiary volcanic and volcano-sedimentary host rocks. The vein systems are structurally controlled and famous for complex late-stage hydrothermal reworking that concentrated silver-rich sulfosalts, base-metal sulfides, and associated minerals near the surface.

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