Campitos Turquoise (Cananea, Sonora): Field Guide

Dealers place the workings on Campitos Mountain, just outside the town of Cananea, Sonora. ^{[5], [10]} Rock & Gem puts the Cananea mines “some 35 miles from the U.S./ Mexico border and approximately 150 miles southeast of Tucson, Arizona.” ^[4] The name, the same article says, means “little field” in Spanish. (One source.) ^[4]

Cananea is a copper town first. Its Buenavista open pit, run by Grupo México’s Southern Copper, holds one of the largest copper reserves in the world. ^[8] The district is a porphyry copper system, ^[7] and the dealers who describe Campitos call it what turquoise usually is in country like this: a copper mineral formed where the ore near the surface has weathered over a very long time. ^{[11], [12]} No geological survey we found discusses the Campitos turquoise itself, and no source ties it to the Buenavista pit.

In 1915, Joseph Pogue surveyed the world’s turquoise and found little south of the border:

“No important deposits of turquois are known in Mexico.”
— Pogue (1915), p. 48 ^[1]

He recorded small finds in Zacatecas and one Sonora locality, found about 1901 in a copper district. ^[1] Ninety-five years later Joe Dan Lowry wrote the opposite:

“The center of modern turquoise mining in Mexico is the Cananea area in the state of Sonora.”
— Lowry (2010), p. 76 ^[2]

Lowry lists the Cananea-area mines by name, among them one he spells “Compitos.” Whether that is the same mine sold today as Campitos is not established in his text, so we don’t treat it as the same. ^[2]

Jorge Ruvalcaba told Rock & Gem in 2024 that his family owns three of the four local mining “pipelines.” Regulations prohibit heavy machinery, so the work is done with smaller machinery: about 50 people on a typical day, up to 200 at peak, bringing out some 400 to 500 pounds a week, down from about a ton a few years before. (One source; Turquoise & Co. repeats the same figures.) ^{[4], [13]}

Rincon Trading in Tucson, Dakota Stones and Turquoise & Co. sell turquoise under the Campitos name, and the Dillon & Nattarika Collection sells stone from the Campitos mine. ^{[5], [9], [13], [10]} No source says whether every stone sold as Campitos comes from the Ruvalcaba claims.

The dealers agree on the 1980s. ^{[5], [9], [12]} No primary record of who opened the mine or first sold its stone has turned up. Dillon & Nattarika write that Cananea and Nacozari turquoise had a major impact on the jewelry market in the late 1990s and early 2000s. ^[14]

Campitos comes out of the ground mostly as nuggets in clay, not as veins in rock: about nine times in ten, by Rock & Gem’s account. (One source.) ^[4] Rincon Trading and Turquoise & Co. also describe nuggets in clay. ^{[5], [13]}

The color runs from light to medium sky blue into blue-green, usually with little matrix. ^{[4], [5], [6], [13]} Pyrite is common, sometimes as bright flecks and sometimes as a gray matrix. ^{[4], [13]} Some pieces carry a light brown or golden web; a few carry a dark spiderweb. ^{[5], [6]} Several dealers compare the best of it to Sleeping Beauty’s even, soft blue. ^{[5], [6], [13]} A jeweler quoted by Rock & Gem gives its hardness as 6 to 6.5 on the Mohs scale. (One source.) ^[4]

Both are sold. Rincon Trading keeps separate categories for natural and stabilized Campitos, ^[5] and Rock & Gem says lower-grade material is stabilized with epoxy resin under pressure for a harder, deeper-colored stone. ^[4] In our terms, clear-resin stabilizing is Stabilized; any dye or hardening process makes a stone Enhanced. A seller should tell you which, in the listing itself. The FTC Jewelry Guides (16 CFR §23.24) require it whenever a treatment isn’t permanent, needs special care, or significantly affects the stone’s value. ^[3] Our full definitions: What Do These Confusing Turquoise Terms Mean?

Sonoran turquoise has been sold under other names for a long time. Lowry wrote of the Baja and Sonora mines:

“For the last hundred years, many tons of turquoise from these mines have been imported into the United States and sold as American turquoise with little or no credit given to the true source of the turquoise.”
— Lowry (2010), p. 76 ^[2]

Dillon & Nattarika say Cananea and Nacozari turquoise “very closely resembles” old Sleeping Beauty, Castle Dome and Morenci. ^[14] Rock & Gem reports Ruvalcaba’s point that the names of stones get changed on the market, so a buyer may own Campitos turquoise and not know it. ^[4]

The same mountain produces stone sold under other names. Rock & Gem counts Sonoran Gold, the green, yellow-webbed material, as a Campitos variety; ^[4] Rincon Trading sells it separately, as Sonoran Gold from the Mina Maria. ^[5] We cover it on its own page: Sonoran Gold Turquoise. Dillon & Nattarika name White Water, Sierra Bella and Nacozari among the other mines of the Campitos Mountains. (One source.) ^[10]