Umiña

Umiña was the emerald goddess of the Manteño, the coastal chiefdoms of what is now Ecuador. Their stories call her the green-eyed daughter of the chief Tohalli. In one version she was murdered and an emerald was taken from her heart; in another she opened her own breast during a drought and became a jewel.

The stone, said to be as large as an ostrich egg when the Spaniards arrived, was kept in a shrine at Manta, where a priest rubbed it on the sick, so she became goddess of health, fertility and rain. Her worship reached the Caranqui of the Andes, and the Manteño were said to have preferred death to giving her up.