French tourist discovers massive 7.46-carat diamond on US road trip. Wanna try your luck?

A road trip across the US turned into a dazzling adventure for a French tourist who stumbled upon a huge 7.46-carat diamond at an Arkansas state park earlier this month.

The French tourist named it ‘Carine Diamond'(Arkansas state park)

Julien Navas, who hails from Paris, was amazed to find the enormous gem on the ground of Crater of Diamonds State Park, where visitors can search for and keep any diamonds they find in a 37.5-acre area, according to state officials.

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Navas had come to the US to see a rocket launch in Florida and then planned to join a friend for some fun on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

But he changed his itinerary when he heard about the unique state park in Arkansas, which is famous for its sparkling treasures, and decided to stop by for a visit, state officials said.

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‘It was hard work’

Navas, who had some experience in gold panning and fossil hunting, rented a simple kit for diamond hunting and started to sift through the muddy soil, which had been softened by heavy rain a few days before.

“It was hard work, so I switched to just looking on the surface for anything unusual by the afternoon,” Navas said.

He spent several hours collecting potential gems and then took them to the park’s centre to verify if he had struck gold – or rather, diamond. One of his finds, a dark brown object that looked like a marble, turned out to be a 7.46-carat diamond – the biggest one found at the park since 2020 and the eighth biggest in the park’s history since it opened in 1972.

The park said the diamond was about the size of a gumdrop.

“I was overjoyed!” he said when he learned the value of his discovery. “All I could think of was telling my fiancée what I found.”

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He named the jewel Carine Diamond after his partner and intends to have the stone split into two diamonds – one for his fiancée and one for his daughter.

About the park

Crater of Diamonds State Park has yielded more than 75,000 diamonds since the first ones were discovered by a farmer on the land that later became the state park.

The largest diamond ever found in the US was unearthed in 1924 during a mining operation on the same land.