Natural stone profile: Dark Emperador marble

We continue here our series of articles about some of the most important Spanish natural stones. This time we present you the Dark Emperador, a deep brown coloured marble that presents an unique look and style.

Background
The Dark Emperador is extracted in the area around the town of Yecla, which is located in the region of Murcia – southeast of Spain. There are currently about ten quarries extracting the Dark Emperador marble. They are very large, with wide exploration fronts and extracting blocks with large dimension. It is estimated that there are large reserves of this marble for future exploration.

Description
The Dark Emperador is a dark brown coloured marble, with fine grain and some irregular and crossed lighter veinage. It presents some occasional signs of calcite with small dimension. The Dark Emperador is a breccial type of stone. Its main variations depend normally on the tonalities it may have (darker or lighter), but also on the amount of calcite (more or less).

Recommended applications
The Dark Emperador is one of the most famous and internationally recognized Spanish natural stones, being found in different types of applications pretty much everywhere. But the types of applications that have given the most credit to this marble are found in interior decoration. Here, it is common to find amazing applications of Dark Emperador in fireplaces, diverse furniture, bathroom design (basins and basin tables) and others.

The Rojo Alicante is commonly found in the market in the forms of:
- slabs
- tiles
- blocks
- finished product (decoration, cladding, etc)

Main markets
The Dark Emperador marble is an internationally recognized marble that can be found pretty much everywhere. Despite this, some of the markets where it has the largest demand are:
- United States of America
- Spain
- Turkey
- Russia
- Some Middle East countries

Alternative names
The Dark Emperador marble can present different names in the market. Some of the most common names are:
- Ramona Brown
- Emperador Brown
- Marron Emperador
- Marron Imperial
- Emperador Marble