One of the most famous gold nuggets ever discovered is heading back to the auction block for the first time in nearly two decades — and experts believe it could bring as much as $7 million.
Known as the "Boot of Cortez," the spectacular gold specimen will headline a June 12 sale at EJ’s Auction & Appraisal in Glendale, AZ. The nugget is being billed as the largest surviving natural gold nugget found in the Western Hemisphere — intact with a metal detector.
Its nickname comes from its uncanny resemblance to the boot worn by Spanish conquistadors. But beyond its striking shape, the nugget’s sheer size and purity have made it legendary among collectors and mineral enthusiasts.
The Boot of Cortez weighs an astonishing 383.10 troy ounces — or 26.2 pounds (11.9 kilograms) — and measures 10¾ inches tall by 7¼ inches wide. Recent third-party X-ray fluorescence (XRF) testing confirmed the nugget is approximately 98% pure gold, an exceptionally high level of purity for a natural specimen of this magnitude.
At today’s gold price of roughly $4,542 per troy ounce, the nugget carries an intrinsic melt value of about $1.7 million. But collectors are expected to pay far more for its rarity, provenance and museum-quality appeal. The opening bid has been set at $1 million, while the estimated hammer price ranges from $3 million to $7 million.
The nugget was discovered in 1989 near Caborca, Mexico, in the Sonoran Desert roughly 70 miles south of the Arizona border and about 60 miles east of the Sea of Cortez. According to accounts of the discovery, an amateur prospector armed with a modest Radio Shack metal detector spent days methodically searching the desert when he heard a distinctive signal unlike the scrap-metal tones he had encountered earlier. As he dug deeper, more and more of the unusual-shaped nugget became revealed.
Since then, the Boot of Cortez has achieved near-mythic status in the mineral world. It has appeared at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show and been exhibited at institutions including the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the American Museum of Natural History.
The nugget last crossed the auction block in January 2008, when it sold for more than $1.3 million — roughly four times the melt value based on the gold spot price at the time. With gold values soaring dramatically since then, collectors are eager to see how high bidding will climb this June.
There is also poetic symmetry in the upcoming sale. Glendale sits only a few hundred miles north of where the nugget was originally unearthed, effectively returning the Boot of Cortez to the Sonoran Desert region after nearly 20 years in a private collection.
Gold nugget enthusiasts may point out that the “Pepita Canaã,” a massive specimen discovered in Brazil in 1983, outweighs the Boot of Cortez by a wide margin. The Brazilian nugget tips the scales at 134.1 pounds (60.8 kilograms) and is permanently displayed at the Museu de Valores do Banco Central. However, Erik Hoyer, owner and CEO of EJ’s Auction & Appraisal, told The Jeweler Blog via email that the Pepita Canaã was neither discovered with a metal detector nor recovered intact from the ground. Instead, it is a fragment of a much larger cluster that broke apart during excavation at Brazil’s Serra Pelada open-pit gold mine. The Brazilian specimen is also about 86% pure gold, compared to the Boot of Cortez at an impressive 98% purity.
The "Welcome Stranger," which was unearthed at Moliagul, Victoria, Australia, in 1869 by John Deason and Richard Oates, owns the distinction of being the largest nugget ever found. It had a gross weight of more than 2,520 troy ounces (173 pounds). Legend states that the Welcome Stranger was so large that it had to be broken into three pieces on an anvil before it could fit on a bank scale.
Credits: Courtesy images by Jeff Noble/jeffnoblepictures.com. Garrett Hoyer and his father, Erik Hoyer, of EJ's Auction & Appraisal pose with the Boot of Cortez.