Wulfenite

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Mineral guide

Learn about Wulfenite

brilliant warm colors and square crystals; prized for rarity of pristine specimens and famed localities like Red Cloud, Touissit, Ojuela.

Regional guide

Wulfenite from Ojuela Mine, Mapimí, Durango, Mexico

Ojuela wulfenite belongs to that small group of mineral specimens whose locality identity is visible at a glance. Instead of the broad, glassy, orange “windowpanes” of many southwestern U.S. classics, the Mapimí material often has a more sculptural, bristling character: tapered yellow to orange-brown crystals, spear-like prisms, thick tablets, and eccentric “sandwich” crystals in which a brown middle zone is framed by yellow outer growth. On the best pieces, the wulfenite is set against the colors that made Ojuela famous—green mimetite, white calcite, brown limonite and goethite, tobacco-green mottramite, and the rusty gossan of a deeply oxidized lead-silver-zinc deposit.