Le Stage

Nature's Art

“Nature has spent millions of years creating what lies before me. My work is not to improve on it, but to understand it well enough to know what to reveal and what to leave untouched.”

Carlos Sanchis, CEO & Founder

Los Catalanes · Artigas · Uruguay

Le Stage Minerals

From discovery to finished piece.

It all begins in Los Catalanes. We have been mining our own agate and amethyst for decades. We recognize what is exceptional and see each piece through to its finishing and presentation.

Origin
Judgment
Craft

Follow the journey ↓

A piece's journey

One piece. The whole journey.

01 DISCOVERY

The geode appears in its basalt or soil matrix.

02 EXTRACTION

Taking it out while preserving what we have not yet seen.

03 READING

Color, crystal, architecture, associations, condition and rarity.

04 SPECIMEN DESIGN

What to preserve, what to reveal, how to orient it.

05 FINISHING

When called for: cutting, surface, polishing and detail.

06 PRESENTATION

Base, orientation and proportion.

Documented from the source.

See the whole journey →

Sunset over a quarry in Los Catalanes, with two machines silhouetted against the sky

Origin

Los Catalanes: where the journey begins.

Preserving the mystery and the beauty.

A blast can fracture a geode, and what breaks inside cannot be put back together: its crystals, its color, its rarities. That is why, since August 2026, Le Stage Minerals has extracted amethyst without explosives, using machinery adapted from the marble industry. We are pioneers worldwide in extracting amethyst at industrial scale without explosives, so that every piece leaves the quarry with everything it holds intact.

How we extract →

An amethyst geode still embedded in the rock of the quarry face: the block cut out and the cavity open, before extraction

A hand miner in a helmet and face shield works with a pneumatic hammer beside a geode at the quarry face

What we record for each piece when we extract it.

PIECEPZA-000123

QUARRYQuarry 4

DATEAugust 12, 2026

RECORDVideo and photos

About Los Catalanes →

IUGS · 2022

Los Catalanes, Geological Heritage Site

Law 20,343 · 2024

Amethyst, National Stone of Uruguay

Judgment

What are we looking at?

What sets a piece apart cannot be weighed.

Two pieces can weigh the same and look nothing alike. What sets them apart is their mineralogical rarity: color, transparency, luster, the minerals that come with it, and features that nature almost never repeats.

A geode is read from the outside in.

An open amethyst geode seen in cross-section: outer basalt, a band of bluish-gray agate, quartz crystal, violet amethyst toward the hollow and a white calcite crystal

A geode from Los Catalanes, unretouched. Not every geode has every layer. Sequence: Arduin-Rode et al. 2025, on Los Catalanes. Green celadonite film: Techera et al. 2007; it cannot be seen with the naked eye in this photo.

Color

The first thing we look at: the depth and distribution of the violet.

Crystal

Size, shape and luster of the points.

Architecture

How the cavity is built.

Associations

Calcite, agate and other minerals that come with it.

Condition

What is intact and what has been worked.

Rarity

What almost never appears.

Learn to read an amethyst →

The extraordinary

The extraordinary is not measured in kilograms.
Rarity can fit in one hand.
Or it can weigh tons.

A clear white calcite crystal on a bed of dark amethyst

The Empress of Uruguay was the first monumental piece from Le Stage Minerals to become widely known: it now has its own Wikipedia page. Larger pieces have come out of Los Catalanes since then.

Monumental pieces →

Human intervention

Human intervention is minimal where the stone doesn't need it. Where it does, it is there so the piece can show what it kept to itself.

Specimen Design

First the stone. Then the decision.

An exceptional piece may call for preservation. Another may need orientation, cutting or polishing to reveal what it holds.

A deeply colored amethyst geode mounted on a metal base in the showroom

About Specimen Design →

Artigas

Some things can only be seen in Artigas.

The full process, from the quarry face to the finished piece. The workshop, where artisans work the stone. Specimen Design: how the cutting and polishing of each piece is decided, and on what criteria. And how each piece is presented and displayed.

Monumental and collection pieces are not published: they are reserved for their future owners. Here we show only a sample; in Artigas there are always several more. Accredited collectors and buyers, once their identity is verified, can also view them privately and online.