This Blue Exists in One Place

You are standing on a beach of grey stones in the southwest of the Dominican Republic. There is almost no sand here. You turn the pebbles over with your foot, the way everybody does, and then one of them stops you. It is blue. Not painted, not glass. Blue the whole way through.

The stone is called larimar, and there is exactly one place on Earth where it comes out of the ground: a single hillside in the mountains above this coast. People have searched for a second one for fifty years and nobody has ever found it. The men who dig it out work with hand tools and buckets on ropes, because a machine would smash the very thing they came for.

The name is not old. In nineteen seventy four a man called Miguel Méndez followed the blue pebbles up a river until he found where they were falling from, and he named the stone after his daughter Larissa and the Spanish word for the sea. If you ever buy one, look hard at the colour. The deeper the blue, the further down that hill somebody had to go.