The power of “red gold of La Mancha.”
T
he Lozano family home in Consuegra, Spain, is an open and airy space, with floor-to-ceiling windows allowing light to flood in through sheer white curtains. A dining table with tall-backed chairs sits next to the windows on a floor tiled with large-format pastel florals. Even if you’re not eating at the table, an earthy scent with a delicate honeyed edge floats through the room.
The source of the aroma becomes clear just beyond the dining room. Tables piled with saffron in all stages of production—from bulb to strands drying on a sieve—infuse the adjacent production space with red-orange splashes of color. The amount of saffron piled on these tables must be worth a fortune. This is the home of the Lozano Company, a fourth-generation family business of saffron producers.
Jeweler Maria del Carmen Zamorano (who goes by the name Mamen) married into the family, though she also comes from a long line of saffron producers in Consuegra, where the spice is the main crop.
“Saffron has been a small source of income for all these [local] families, a small underground economy,” Zamorano tells me through a translator. “With the saffron money…they could manage large expenses such as a daughter’s wedding, a car, [or] a house. It has always been said that saffron was the piggy bank of the poor.”
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When Zamorano was young, she would help her family collect crocus flowers from the fields. She remembers watching butterflies float by during the work, fluttering from flower to flower. Today, she has eternalized that moment into jewelry, creating a butterfly pendant with wings made from flower petals and pieces of saffron nestled inside them.
The butterfly, she says, symbolizes transformation. Part of her mission in making jewelry is to transform saffron’s use from solely for culinary purposes to immortalizing it in a handmade jewel that people can wear for special occasions or just to feel imbued with the power of the “red gold of La Mancha.”
From that one butterfly emerges a longer line of jewelry, from earrings and bracelets to rings and necklaces, all featuring strands of saffron held in place with resin. Zamorano has named her jewelry company Estigma; the name celebrates women in the saffron industry, as they are the ones who typically harvest the fields and dedicate their lives to the spice.
“This flower represents the most characteristic crop of La Mancha,” Zamorano says. “Its stigmas are the feminine part of the flower and its identity. Each of our jewels symbolizes femininity, culture, and essence.”
Zamorano started Estigma with research and development in 2019 and finally began to sell her jewelry in 2021. The pieces range in price from about €15 to €25.
Estigma Joyas
Harvesting saffron is no easy feat. Women collect crocus blooms, peel the flower, and roast the saffron for 20 days during the harvest season. Workdays can sometimes stretch to 18 hours long, without much time to rest between shifts. Zamorano says it takes 250,000 flowers for just one kilogram of saffron. Making her jewelry is a similarly intense process, as she goes through saffron harvests strand by strand to find the perfect ones for her product.
“I select the best stigmas based on each piece,” she says. “When you make them, none of them are the same. There are standards of quality and equality, but no piece is 100% the same as another because the stigmas are different. That’s why they are unique pieces.”
Wearing saffron—or at least things dyed with it—is hardly new. In the Hindu tradition, saffron is sometimes used in red dye on the forehead, and in Rome, the ancients used it to dye marriage robes. In ancient Persia, saffron threads were even woven into carpets and funeral shrouds. The color and the spice have historically been considered sacred and a symbol of luck.
In addition to bringing back the sacred space and beauty that saffron occupies, Zamorano also says her saffron jewelry is a vital reminder of who she and her community are.
“[My jewelry] is important because our society may not know where to go, but it cannot forget where it comes from,” she says. “For our entire region, saffron has been a very important economic pillar. But it is currently a crop that is disappearing due to the lack of mechanization and the abandonment that purely artisanal crops are suffering. Who knows if, in the future, our jewelry will be the only memory we have of saffron from La Mancha. I sincerely hope that this does not happen. Great memories will be erased, and the identity of our region will be lost a little.”
