We acquired a fine lot of this material from Alí Hmani and today he delivered it to us, here in Sainte Marie. He still has many specimens, all of them with good quality, and he is going to sell them during the Show at his stand (one of the tents close to the Theater), so we recommend to visit him to take a look at this material. Images speak for themselves, so we publish here these two photos to show the quality of these new Azurites with Malachite from Bou Bekker.

To Be Continued...

Jordi

As usual in recent years, this Show will not supply too much novelties.  Although in the previous days it seemed that nothing new will appear, finally some exciting new things have appeared. We will inform about them in the next days. To start, today we would like to mention the new Acanthite specimens from Imiter (Morocco) always with the pseudo-octahedral crystal form, but this time grey and shiney, not black, so pretty esthetic with their curious forms. With this post we include two images of them. The images don't reflect so well their beauty, we will try to do better when return to Barcelona.

We also add a picture of the latest Goethite specimens from La Lapilla (Huelva, Spain), those we talked about in our first report. Crossed thin bars of Goethite growths with delicate colors. Color is less intense than the others from Tharsis, but the forms are very attractive.

We also saw some nice Shattuckite specimens, some of them covered by Quartz crystals and accompanied by Malachite.

Many people are saying that the economical crisis has also arrived to the minerals, but the traffic here is very intense and the business seems to be satisfactory. A good specimen always deserves an effort, and we think that many collectors accept this.

Other main news is that this show could move to Colmar in the future. The situation is very complex and hard to resolve. It is true that the logistic problems in organizing this show in so small a village as Sainte Marie cause an enormous effort for the producers of the show and also for the exhibitors, who are subjected to inconveniences as well as for the visitors who suffer the absence of support, like Hotels, and also experience queues to access the show because of the reduced dimensions of Sainte Marie and the access roads which do not have the capacity to accommodate the traffic that the show generates.

Having said this, my opinion, and also the opinion of the vast majority of the exhibitors and visitors with whom spoke, is that it would be a big mistake to change this show to a new place, because its success is due to its singularity and if this show becomes a show like others, placed in a regular exhibitor area in a large city, it will change to a common show without its "glamour". The prevailing opinion that I hear is that if the show moves to Colmar, neither the exhibitors nor the customers will be motivated to visit it again.

Is not easy to say what will happen in the future but our position is also that if this show moves to Colmar we probably won't attend this show as exhibitors. The organization must decide, its decision is very complicated and we should respect it.  What we do here is to reflect the news and try to expose opinions about this topic, the opinions of the visitors and the opinions of the organizers. We will see what happens in the future (when it happens)

Jordi