Ecuador

On the coast of Ecuador, goldsmiths made jewellery from grains of platinum found in river sand, more than a thousand years before Europe.

The grains could not be melted; the fire was not hot enough. So the smiths mixed them with gold, heated, hammered and heated again, until they fused into a pale metal.

From it they made nose rings and other jewellery.

When the Spanish later found the same kind of grains in the region’s gold-bearing rivers, they saw them as an impurity they could not get rid of. They called the metal platina, Spanish for “little silver”. That is where the word platinum comes from.