Santo Domingo’s Amber and Larimar Jewelry Artisans

The workshop of Rafael Encarnación occupies a single narrow room off a courtyard in Santo Domingo’s Zona Colonial, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas, where the cobblestone streets outside carry the accumulated foot traffic of five centuries. Inside, the walls are lined with small drawers, each labeled in Rafael’s cramped handwriting, containing raw amber in shades ranging from pale honey to a deep, almost black cherry red, alongside smaller stores of larimar, the pale blue-green stone found almost nowhere else on Earth outside a single mountainous region in the country’s southwest.

Rafael is fifty-eight and has spent thirty-four years working amber and larimar into jewelry, learning the trade from an uncle who worked the amber mines near Santiago before turning to lapidary work in the capital. The two stones, though often sold together to tourists as a matched pair of Dominican specialties, could not be more different in character, and Rafael handles each with a distinct set of tools and an entirely different rhythm of work.

Amber, formed from the fossilized resin of an extinct tree species and dated in Dominican deposits to between fifteen and forty million years old, is prized internationally for its unusually high concentration of inclusions—insects, plant matter, occasionally small vertebrates trapped in the resin before it hardened. Rafael’s most valuable pieces are those containing a well-preserved insect, and his workshop’s back room holds a small private collection of amber specimens he has decided never to sell, including one piece containing what he believes, based on consultation with a visiting entomologist years ago, to be an extinct species of ant.

Larimar, by contrast, is a variety of the mineral pectolite that develops its distinctive blue coloration only under a specific combination of volcanic conditions found in the Bahoruco mountain range near Barahona. It was not formally identified and named until 1974, making it, in geological terms, a remarkably recent discovery, and its single-source origin means global supply depends entirely on continued extraction from a set of increasingly deep and difficult mining sites in that one region.

“People ask me which stone I love more,” Rafael says, holding a rough piece of larimar up to the light streaming through his workshop’s single window, studying the cloud-like patterns within it before deciding how to orient his first cut. “I tell them it’s like asking which of your parents you love more. Amber is patient—millions of years of patience. Larimar is dramatic—it comes from fire and pressure. I need both moods some days.”

The technical challenge of working each stone requires him to shift not just tools but temperament. Amber, though visually dense, is relatively soft, ranking low on the Mohs hardness scale, meaning it can be carved and polished with comparatively simple tools, but it is also prone to cracking under uneven heat or pressure, requiring patience and a light touch, particularly when Rafael is working a piece with a visible inclusion he does not want to damage. Larimar, harder and more brittle in different ways, resists shaping more aggressively and requires diamond-coated tools to cut cleanly, along with a careful eye toward each stone’s internal patterning, since the mineral’s prized coloration is unevenly distributed and a poorly planned cut can waste the most valuable section of a piece.

The rising tension in Rafael’s recent years in the trade centers on the increasing difficulty and cost of sourcing quality larimar in particular. The Barahona mines that supply the stone have grown progressively deeper and more dangerous over decades of extraction, with the highest-quality material increasingly difficult to reach, driving up costs and pushing some elements of the supply chain toward informal, poorly regulated small-scale mining operations that Rafael, along with several other established jewelers in the Zona Colonial, has grown uneasy about, both for labor-safety reasons and for concerns about long-term sustainability of the resource.

Two years ago, this tension came to a head when Rafael discovered that a batch of larimar he had purchased through a longtime supplier had been sourced from an unlicensed mining operation where, he later learned, at least one worker had been seriously injured in a tunnel collapse. He returned the material, at a significant financial loss, and began the slower, more expensive process of sourcing exclusively through a smaller cooperative of licensed miners near Los Chupaderos who could account for their labor practices, even though it meant less consistent supply and higher costs passed on to his clients.

The turning point, for Rafael, came not from the financial resolution of that decision but from a visit, several months later, to the Los Chupaderos cooperative itself, where he met the miners directly for the first time after years of working only through intermediaries. Watching the physical difficulty of the extraction firsthand—men descending narrow, hand-dug shafts with only headlamps and basic tools, working stone by stone through volcanic rock in cramped, humid conditions—reframed, he says, his entire relationship to the material he had spent decades cutting and polishing in the relative comfort of his Santo Domingo workshop.

“I used to think of larimar as beautiful stone,” he says. “After that visit, I think of it as beautiful stone that costs somebody real sweat and real risk to bring up from the ground. Now when I cut it, I think about that. It changes how careful you are not to waste any of it.”

These days, Rafael sells a small percentage of his finished pieces directly from his Zona Colonial workshop to visitors who seek him out specifically, drawn by his reputation among a smaller circle of serious jewelry collectors, while the bulk of his production moves through a handful of galleries in the capital. He has begun, in the past year, attaching a small card to pieces made from Los Chupaderos material, noting the cooperative’s name, a gesture toward transparency he hopes other Zona Colonial jewelers will eventually adopt as sourcing scrutiny around larimar continues to grow.

On a recent evening, closing the workshop as the Zona Colonial’s streetlamps flicker on and the courtyard outside fills with the sound of a nearby restaurant’s live merengue set, Rafael holds up the day’s finished piece—a pendant combining both stones, a teardrop of blue-green larimar set beside a smaller round of deep red amber, the ancient and the young Caribbean stone paired in a single setting. It is, he says, his favorite kind of piece to make, though he rarely sells them; he prefers to gift them, on occasion, to visiting geologists or journalists who take the time to ask, as almost no tourist buying a quick souvenir ever does, where exactly the stones came from and what it cost to bring them up.

More Fashion & Entertainment News