Travel Guide Tortiya

Tortiya is a small town located in the Bandama valley, between Bouaké and Korhogo, about 100 kilometers northwest of Katiola. Curled up on the edge of the Bou River, Tortiya looks like an open-pit mine, its red earth belly dug and turned over on all sides by hundreds of feverish hands. The researchers dig in a mess of shafts and galleries until they have excavated the whole area, then start again a little further, and so on; the research area being spread over nearly sixty kilometers in all directions, some of them do not return home for several months. It is in this impressive lunar landscape crossed by the Bou that the Stephanois Marius Sauvade, a former foreman of the diamond mine nicknamed "Seval" by the villagers, installed his "straw hut" in the 1980s. In 2017, Sodemi (Société pour le développement minier de Côte d'Ivoire), which was awarded a mining research permit for diamonds in Tortiya by decree, conducted various prospecting activities in the town's perimeter. While many local residents remain convinced that the Tortiya area is still rich in diamonds, most gem seekers, whether clandestine or not, have preferred to migrate to Katiola, Séguéla or other countries in the sub-region, such as Mali, which are more likely to make successful discoveries. For example, there were nearly 50,000 diamond miners in 1983-84, compared to barely a few hundred today, mainly men, women and children from Burkina Faso and Mali, who toil in hostile, violent and sometimes lethal working conditions, for the equivalent of about 30 euros a month. They are all looking for THE stone that will change their lives, although statistically this type of stone only comes out once every twenty years. They sometimes find diamonds of varying sizes and purity, which a wholesaler will pay them barely 30% of the estimated price.A word of caution. There is a bit of a western atmosphere in this mushroom town that has sprung up out of nowhere, which has experienced a meteoric rise and a brutal abandonment, and continues to feed the fantasies and desires of adventurers more or less scrupulous. The security conditions are relative.