Emerald Hunters?

 Oh the things you sometimes learn thanks to random online researches. Like a few days ago, when I stumbled on this article from the Guardian. Well, an article, more like a pictorama. It's about a yearly emerald hunt in Colombia. it looks muddy, messy and far less glamorous than sounds. And I learned that Colombia is the main producer of emeralds. Like I said, the things you learn randomly online. I only Colombia for another natural resource (you know the one), far more sinister. But this emerald hunt would make for a great backdrop for an epic crime fiction story. Emeralds make for great MacGuffins to begin with. In And what an array of characters these emerald hunters would make: some like the gold diggers of old, trying their luck, some obsessive, some maybe more prone to gain the precious green stones through any means necessary. It might have been written before, who knows. I will look into it.