Fiesta of Gems: The Legacy of Culver City’s Rock and Mineral Club

Members of Culver City’s Rock and Mineral Club are no strangers to hidden gems.

Quietly operating out of the Culver City Scout Building next to the Wende Museum, the Culver City Rock and Mineral Club has quietly served as a fixture in the Culver City community for more than six decades. They are best known for their annual “Fiesta of Gems,” a summer event returning for its 63rd installment this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Veterans Memorial Building, featuring vendors, demonstrations, and a passionate group of Culver City craftspeople showcasing the fruits of their labor.

But the club is much more than just a single event. Packed in the tiny rooms and tight corridors of their workshop are tools lovingly used by its “rockhound” members to turn uncut stones into jewelry and trinkets. The use of these tools during the workshop’s operating hours on Wednesdays and weekends is just one of several perks available to members of the club, the only one of its kind in West Los Angeles.

“There are clubs all over the country, all over California," Culver City Rock and Mineral Club President Alexa Hunter told Culver Crescent. “There's one in the Valley and in Orange County, but we are the only one in this part of Los Angeles.”

People who operate these tools must be aware of the safety risks associated with the high-powered machinery used to shape materials such as jade and agate. The club hosts workshops four times a month that teach basic skills such as metal smithing, lapidary, and wax carving, along with the safety precautions needed to use the sharp blades and hot flames required to practice these techniques.

Club members also try to make local connections at events like science fairs and other school gatherings to educate the community and raise awareness of the club and its unique focus.

While the Festival of Gems serves as the club’s primary source of revenue, membership dues of $25 per person from its approximately 200 members also help pay its costs. Members at the club generally range in age from 20 to 80, and they can pay $1.50 per hour to use the saws and other tools, which also supports the club. In addition to covering costs such as rent and machine upkeep, the club's funds are donated to local organizations, including Scout troops and other nonprofits.

The club also hosts smaller events, like a picnic in August and a pair of silent auctions, to get members together and involved, auctioning off donated collections that Hunter says aren’t hard to come by. Members are also invited to attend a monthly club meeting, where guest speakers with expertise in various facets of the rock-and-mineral hobby share their insights.

“They could be someone who has been hounding in Australia in a pink diamond mine, or they could be someone whose specialty is agates of Arizona,” Hunter said of meeting speakers.

Another perk of being a Culver City Rock and Mineral Club member is the opportunity to participate in field trips sponsored by the club and similar clubs for geology enthusiasts. Many of these are genuine rock-hunting expeditions that are sometimes run in conjunction with other clubs, taking members all around California and sometimes even beyond to places like New Mexico’s Royston Turquoise Mine and Castle Butte, a sandstone summit in Utah.

The frequency of these trips varies, but Hunter says they generally happen around three or four times a year.

“California has such great resources,” Hunter explained.

Other clubs also invite members of the Culver City club to participate in their field trips, and some of these excursions put rockhounds directly in the field. One of these trips — sponsored by the Roseville Rock Rollers Gem and Mineral Society — has rock and mineral hunters meeting in the Hawthorne and Mina communities in the aptly named Mineral County, Nevada, to seek out unique local mineral deposits.

The area is remote enough that a radio is recommended, and the terrain requires participants to be physically able to handle themselves.

“This is not a casual day in the park trip. This is some serious travel into remote desert locations, with long drives from site to site,” the description for the Hawthorne/Mina trip says. “This is tough and dirty rock hounding [with] bugs, snakes, tics, holes, mine shafts, nails, [barbed] wire, and heaven knows what else is out there!”

The Culver City Rock and Mineral Club was founded in 1961, and it quickly established a showcase for its members. As early as June 1961, articles appeared in the Star Newspaper describing efforts to organize what would eventually become the Fiesta of Gems.

That first iteration was not formally the Fiesta of Gems — it was attached to the Art and Hobby Show seen at early Fiesta La Ballonas. Efforts to create a separate show were undertaken, and the Fiesta of Gems was detached from Fiesta La Ballona and moved to its own venue in 1962.

Almost 65 years later, the Fiesta of Gems has turned into a household name. Vendors from New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada seek out the Culver City Rock and Mineral Club to participate in the Fiesta, and it serves as its centerpiece event and top revenue generator. Attendees can find a wide range of products, from jewelry and trinkets to raw materials and the tools needed to shape them for sale from more than 30 vendors this year.

A gem or mineral is selected each year as the theme of the Fiesta of Gems. The process of selecting the gem of the show is left to a separate committee within the club that is specifically focused on Fiesta organization. Factors like recently featured gems and notoriety go into the decision of which stone to highlight each year, and even the photo used to promote the gem is heavily scrutinized by the club’s Fiesta Committee.

“We have a couple of people who save all the information every year, and we look back on it,” Publicity Chairperson Janice Metz said. “We don't duplicate, and we make sure that it's a rock that's not always well known.”

2026’s Fiesta of Gems features malachite, a green colored mineral known for its swirling and rippling patterns. Many vendors have hosted booths at the Fiesta of Gems for years and have built trust with the club, while new vendors looking to appear at the show are vetted to ensure their legitimacy. Scrutiny is critical because fake or misclassified stones are a common issue in the rockhounding community, and accurate mineral identifiers are crucial members of that community.

“They have to have some sort of credential, and this isn’t their first show,” Hunter said of the qualities that the club is looking for when selecting new vendors.

In addition to featuring vendors, demonstrations and workshops are also scheduled each year. Unlike the workshops normally put on by the club, these Fiesta workshops can be much more advanced and extravagant. One of the eight workshops features gem trees that have been a popular attraction at Fiestas in years past.

One of the more unexpected features of the Fiesta of Gems is the sale of plants in the lobby of the Veterans Memorial Building. Some members of the club are growing succulents alongside their stone-based work, which Hunter says serves as a noticeable revenue stream within the Fiesta of Gems. Members don’t sell their rock-related work — many members elect to display some of their work in a long display case in the middle of the Veterans Auditorium.

While the financial boon from vendors and the publicity from the 2,000 people who visited the Fiesta last year are exciting, it is the specimens themselves and the endless possibilities they represent that are the most anticipated pieces of the show for rockhounds like Hunter and Metz.

“I love just seeing what's new out there, what they're bringing back from Tucson, what they're bringing back from Quartzsite, and what I can do with it,” Metz said.

“I don't spend a lot of money at the show, but I always end up getting something,” Hunter said, “and I'm always happy.”