There is a real Emerald City, and to get there, you go by boat. About 35 miles southwest of Key West, near the Marqueses Keys, the Mel Fisher salvage vessel Magruder is anchored in about 50 feet of water. There the crew is hard at work dredging sand, shells and muck onto the deck, searching for a flash of green – the tell-tale glint of emeralds."¨

DON KINCAIDIn nature, emeralds form a six-sided crystal. These are uncut jems from the Atocha wreck.Atocha emeralds, as they're known, were mined in Columbia 400 years ago, loaded onto a Spanish galleon in at least two boxes and later lost at sea in a 1622 shipwreck. One of those boxes contained dark bluish-green stones, the trademark of Columbia's Muzo mine, the source of some of the finest emeralds in the world.

While the Atocha went down centuries ago, the story of her cargo is ongoing. Five stones found today, 10 yesterday, 41 in one week during September. The largest was two carats, worth about $20,000 as a recovered artifact.

"¨"¨Those discoveries are due to the work of Mel Fisher, who earned the rank as one of the world's greatest treasure hunters by discovering the Atocha, which has since yielded more than $450 million in recovered artifacts."¨

"¨The "mother load," as Fisher's crew likes to call it, was found in 1985, in 55 feet of water near Florida's Marquesas Keys, about 35 miles west of Key West. Atocha emeralds, the ones being found today, are some of the first to have come out of the Muzo mine. They are watermelon green and uncut. The largest found so far was 87 carats, and is today on display at the non-profit Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West.

"¨Legal battles ensued after such a massive find, with the state of Florida claiming it had the right to the ship and its cargo. But after 111 court cases, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Fisher indeed owned the Atocha and had exclusive claim to continue searching the site for artifacts."¨

"¨'RAINING EMERALDS'

"Mel Fisher always talked about emeralds," says Andy Matroci, captain of the Magruder. "Mel saw a document that said there were 70 pounds of uncut Muzo emeralds loaded on the Atocha back in 1622. They were not on the manifest, they were being smuggled by somebody onboard the ship.""¨

"¨While the historical document Fisher was referring to was never found during his lifetime, the evidence of their existence became indisputable when the emeralds started popping up at the Atocha site."¨

"¨"Bill Moore was the first diver to find one," Matroci continued, "I remember the expression Bill had on his face when he came up from his dive, that smile, I knew he had found something good. Then he showed me this big green emerald between his fingers.""¨"¨Then there was the day when it rained emeralds, literally.

"¨"¨Diver Vince Trotta and his dive partner were using a hand-held suction device called an air-lift to clear the sand away from the bedrock in search of treasure. They heard a clacking sound, something hard being sucked up through the aluminum tubing."¨

"¨"The air-lift pumps the unwanted sand into the water column a few feet above the divers' heads, and the current carries it away," Matroci explained. If we sucked up a musket ball, it might come straight down and hit the diver in the head; if it was a silver coin, the coin might drift over and land a few feet away, depending on the current. Emeralds are lighter than either a silver coin or a musket ball, so they would drift slowly back down to the ocean floor.""¨

"¨On that day, Trotta hit a large pocket of green Muzo emeralds. They clacked through his airlift tubing and flew into the water, then slowly, like a slow-motion dream sequence, they floated in the water column, flowing with the current. "I picked up my slate and wrote, 'It's raining emeralds!' and showed it to my dive partner" Trotta recalled. "I was picking them out of the water as they fell all around me. Then a reef fish, a porgie, swam down and picked up a ten-carat emerald in its mouth and started swimming away. I took off after him and he spit it out.""¨DON KINCAIDMuzo emeralds are known for their distinctive color.

"¨It was a moment of rare discovery that Vince Trotta will never forget – 2,300 emeralds found in one day.

"¨"¨INTO THE FUTURE

"¨"¨So far, about six pounds (about 13,500 carats) of emeralds have been found on the Atocha site, leaving more than 60 additional pounds of undiscovered stones to be found. That's if Mel Fisher was right about the ship's smuggled cargo."¨

"¨Emerald expert Manuel Marcial of Emeralds International in Key West estimates that the Atocha emerald collection is so valuable that if the Fisher family continues to find them, the emeralds might soon surpass the value of all the Atocha gold and silver combined. "¨

"¨"If you covered your palm with just the smaller stones," Marcial said, "you would hold in your hand more than a million dollars worth of emeralds."

"¨"¨Why so expensive? These emeralds were found twice – first by the Spaniards at the Muzo mine and then again in 1985 on the Atocha site.

"¨"¨Emeralds in general are considerably more rare in nature than diamonds. Emeralds from the Muzo mine are found in the crown jewels of monarchies around the world. Their distinctive deep green color makes them highly prized.

"¨"¨Ninety percent of Atocha emeralds found so far are gem-facetable quality, showing that there was some selection process among the Spaniards who brought them on horseback from the Muzo mine, 500 miles across the mountains to Cartagena where they were loaded on the Atocha."¨

"¨BACK IN EMERALD CITY"¨

"¨Back on the Magruder's deck, heavy-duty pumps are sucking sand off the ocean bottom up onto tables and over a wire grid. The sharp-eyed treasure hunters are sifting through the sandy matrix as if panning for gold in a California river.

"¨"¨They are a mixture of professional divers and investors who are looking for a little adventure by searching for Atocha emeralds. The professional Mel Fisher Divers do this job for a living, searching for treasure every day. They earn a nice bonus when they find something valuable, like a gold bar or a sizeable emerald.

The amateur treasure hunters are a mix of everyday people who have invested in the Fisher company. They get to keep the first thing they find, up to six times the amount of their investment, and they share in everything found at the end of the year. "¨"¨Each of them is busy this day, pushing the rocks and sand away, looking for that next glint of green.