Fabre, Jordi (1957- )

Jordi Fabre i Fornaguera is a well-known mineral collector, former dealer, and documentarian on the international mineral scene. Personable and fluent in English (with a clipped Catalan accent), he is popular among collectors of rare and attractive specimens, with a particular specialization in minerals from Spain and neighboring countries. He was born in Barcelona, Spain on April 22, 1957, the son of Maria Fornaguera Botey and Delmiro Fabre Viñals, an administrator. Growing up in Barcelona, he attended the Sagrada Familia secondary school, the Instituto Sant Josep de Calassanç, and the University Central de Barcelona, where he majored in Biology, graduating in 1980. He began collecting minerals when he was nine years old, and by age 14, with his brother Francesc, he was already traveling through Spain, Portugal, Morocco and France in search of minerals. Today he says that he has “always been fascinated by minerals: their crystallography, their quiet perfection and their mysterious soul,” as well as by “the possibility of sharing a specimen, its locality, its history, and the knowledge surrounding it, with other people.”

During college and for a while after graduating, Jordi worked as a printer for the Xaloc co-operative and later for the El Tinter co-operative, while also working as a part-time mineral dealer from 1971. For Jordi, selling was never completely separate from collecting: dealing in minerals gave him the opportunity to see more specimens, travel to more localities, meet more collectors, and finance his own growing collection. A decisive moment came in 1972, when he met Joaquín Folch Girona—the greatest mineral collector that Catalonia, and even Spain, has ever produced. Until Folch’s death in 1984 he was Jordi’s mentor, teaching him an enormous amount about minerals, collections, and, especially, how to look at a specimen; that “education of the eye” has remained with Jordi, he says, to the present day. He is especially enamored of rare or uncommon mineral species, but he also appreciates aesthetic pieces which combine beauty with rarity. Jordi has also excelled as a field collector, having dug specimens at Estella, Navarra, Spain (an actinolite-byssolite skarn), Costabona in the Pyrenees Mountains, Eugui (Navarra), and Montseny (Barcelona).

In 1986 Jordi became a full-time mineral dealer, and what began very modestly then as Fabre Minerals evolved into more than 50 years of activity in the international mineral market. Over the years he attended the Ste.-Marie-aux-Mines, Munich and Tucson shows and met collectors, dealers, miners, scientists and museum people from all over the world, many of whom became customers and quite a few of whom became friends; sometimes, happily, they became both. Jordi affirms that dealing, for him, was never simply buying something for one price and selling it for another. A mineral specimen has an identity—a species, locality, geological context, and history—and often there is a succession of owners, identified by their labels, behind the specimen. Knowing and preserving that information has always been essential to Jordi.

His first Tucson show as a dealer was in 1990 at the Executive Inn, where he occupied a window-lined showroom in the lobby which he called “the fish bowl.” He was the first Spanish dealer (and one of the few Europeans) with a booth at the TGMS “Main Show” in 1994 and 1995. He also set up as a dealer at the major shows in Munich and Ste.-Marie-aux-Mines; from attending various shows in Spain he received over 20 awards for “best specimen” or “best display,” and he won a “best specimens displayed” award at the Bourg d’Oisans Show in France. Throughout this time he took frequent trips to far-flung places to buy up specimens and collections, including five or six trips per year to Morocco, Panasqueira and several localities in Spain. And throughout this time he never stopped collecting himself. The collection grew alongside the business, although he soon discovered two inconvenient facts: his budget was not unlimited, and he wanted the best specimens which were possible to obtain. So he decided to collect only from the four countries nearest to Barcelona: Spain, Portugal, Morocco and France. Even today he remains an avid collector of whatever interests him—provided that it comes from one of those nearby countries where he has the best chance to acquire pieces of highest distinction.

In 1996, Jordi launched fabreminerals.com, becoming one of the first three mineral dealers in the world to move seriously onto the Internet, and pioneering online mineral dealing in Europe. With this new technology a collector thousands of kilometers away could see a specimen, read its description and locality information, and buy it without ever having met the dealer (in 1996 this did not sound as “normal” as it does today). What Jordi began was necessarily a commercial website—he was a mineral dealer, and his purpose was to sell specimens—but from the beginning he tried to do something more: to reproduce the level of detail of which museums, or some of the greatest collections such as the Folch collection, had taught him to be aware. A photograph on the screen had to represent the specimen honestly, the locality had to be given as accurately as possible, the description had to be reliable, and the collector had to know that he could trust the person behind the screen to stand behind what he was offering.

In 2005, Joaquín Folch Girona’s grandson asked Jordi to act as sales agent for the Folch collection in order to liquidate duplicates (over 14,000 specimens) and recycle the cash generated from the sales to buy top-quality specimens of new finds to add to the Folch collection. Jordi accepted this proposal, and in June 2005 he started selling the duplicates and purchasing the “upgrade” pieces. Meanwhile Jordi’s own collection has come to number over 4,000 specimens from Spain, Portugal, Morocco and France, including a good representation of high-quality specimens (comparing well with the best known) of many very rare species.

In 2006, on his own (but with the technical help of his nephew Joan Fabre), Jordi created FMF (Friends of Minerals Forum / Foro de Mineralogía Formativa) in two languages, English and Spanish. In the beginning this was conceived as an extension of his business, but it soon changed into a kind of network where everyone with a passion for minerals could share their thoughts. It has become an online meeting place where collectors, mineralogists, scientists, dealers and other sorts of enthusiasts can exchange information, and where that information will remain available to everyone. Now, 20 years later, the two FMF forums have accumulated an enormous archive of discussions, locality information, photographs, reports from mineral shows, and various contributions from people throughout the mineral world, and its Spanish version has become the leading Spanish-language mineral forum. Two of its sections are even registered in Spain as serial publications with their own ISSN numbers and are included in the International ISSN Register—very unusual for an Internet forum.

At the same time, Jordi continued collaborating with and writing for mineralogical magazines and publications. For him, printed publications and the Internet have never been competitors but, rather, just different ways of preserving knowledge and making it available to others. A very recent example now in preparation is an issue of ExtraLapis devoted to the mineralogy of Spain, a project in which Jordi has been deeply involved; the publication will show many specimens from his collection.

On October 1, 2023, Jordi closed Fabre Minerals, as some health problems in his family made it impossible for him to keep working as a dealer with the same old intensity (one of his personal rules has always been “if you can’t do it really well, don’t do it”). But he did not want the huge photographic and documentary archive accumulated over his 50 years as a dealer to remain simply the archive of a former business, and so he initiated #MVM: Minerals Virtual Museum / Museo Virtual de Minerales. His aim for #MVM, ambitious and necessarily long-term, is to transform and expand the former Fabre Minerals archive into a very large online mineral museum where anyone can find well-documented specimens representing mineral species and localities from around the world. Every day he revises old entries and adds specimens, species and localities that were not represented in Fabre Minerals before. What was once primarily a commercial archive is progressively becoming something else—a freely accessible mineralogical reference collection of images and information. In early 2026, as a follow-up, he created the new FMF—Fundació Mineralògica Fabre, a legally constituted non-profit foundation—to provide an institutional and legal umbrella for the two FMF forums created 20 years earlier as well as for #MVM, and, above all, to help give these projects a continuity beyond himself.

Looking back, Jordi now sees a continuous line connecting all of these activities. First he used the Internet to sell minerals, then increasingly to document them and share knowledge about them, and today he is trying to use everything accumulated during his years in the mineral world to preserve that knowledge. And he remains a collector: minerals came first, the business came later, the two lived together harmoniously, and now, without the demands of the business, minerals have come back to stay.

Jordi’s “outside” interests include writing and literature, art, music (he studied oboe for two years in the Conservatorio de Música, Barcelona), ethology (animal behavior), ethnography, gastronomy, movies, nature and sports (he played federated table tennis for five years in Barcelona). He is fluent in a number of languages including Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Portuguese, and is fairly good in English, with notions also of Arabic and Romanian. He is currently married to Carme Gimeno, and he has a daughter, Alba, 32 years old in 2026.

Jordi’s labels show just two different addresses: the earlier one (1971-1989) is Sant Joan de Malta street number 5, Barcelona, but in 1989 he moved to his current address, Arc de Sant Marti 79 local, 08032 Barcelona. The labels for specimens in his personal collection will carry catalog numbers keyed to a digital database containing more information on each specimen. His online forums can be accessed at http://www.foro-minerales.com (Spanish forum) and http://www.mineral-forum.com (English forum).

Bibliography and References:

2001: “Bellmunt del Priorato, un Yacimiento Histórico en Cataluña,” Bocamina, vol. 7, 28-63.

2010: “Jordi Fabre i Fornaguera, Collector of the Exquisite,” by Carlos Curto (about Jordi’s personal collection), Rocks & Minerals, vol. 85 (November-December 2010).

2011: “FMF Celebrates Five Years: a Conversation with Founder Jordi Fabre,” by Antonio Alcaide, Rocks & Minerals, vol. 86 (September-October 2011). This article is also online.

2013: “The Panasqueira Mines: One Hundred Years of Fluorapatite,” ExtraLapis, Vol. 17, 70-81.

2014: “The Panasqueira mines, Castelo Branco District, Portugal,” by Carles Curto Milá and Jordi Fabre, Mineralogical Record, 45 (1), 11-55.

2014: “Panasqueira, Portugal,” Lapis, 7-8, 16-63.

Various contributions to Paragénesis (created in 2016), as well as two pages in the multi-author French book Fluorite (pp. 34-35), short columns on various mineralogical websites, and work as an advisor to different mineral magazines.

2022: “Jordi Fabre,” in Eureka! Self-Collected Minerals, a supplement to the Mineralogical Record, 53 (3), 118-119.

2022: “Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines Show 2022,” by Nicolas Born, Carles Manresa and Jordi Fabre, Mineralogical Record, 53 (5), 659-672.

2023: “The MIM Museum,” by Bryan Swoboda, Carles Manresa Pla and Jordi Fabre, Rocks & Minerals, vol 98 (November-December 2023).

2024: “The Berbes Fluorite District, Asturias, Spain,” by Raúl Sanabria Orellana and Jordi Fabre Fornaguera, Mineralogical Record, 55 (1), 17-74.