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"¨While the historical document Fisher was referring to was never found during his lifetime, the evidence of their existence became indisputable when the emeralds started popping up at the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