According to Mirror, a 22-year-old woman in Galicia, Spain, Natalia Freire went to Restaurant Casa Sampedro in A Coruña with her boyfriend and ordered a clam dish to enjoy.
As she ate, Natalia felt she bit into something hard and spit it out to find a purple pearl, which surprised and delighted her!
Although Natalia has not yet taken the pearl to an expert for appraisal, the event has created a local sensation. Some jewelry experts estimate that the purple pearl surpasses the ordinary white pearl and could be worth up to 4,000 euros (about RM18,678).
According to the Galicia Press, Natalia thought the seafood dish was delicious, so she took advantage of the dinner and spent 19 euros (about RM88) with her boyfriend to enjoy the dish, not expecting her to find something so valuable.
Javier García, the owner of the restaurant, was also very surprised, saying that this was the first time he had encountered such a thing in the decades he had been running the restaurant, and it was incredible.
He originally thought that only oysters (oysters) would produce pearls, but he didn’t expect La La to have them too. On the other hand, the restaurant chef also joked that the speed of clam dishes would be slower in the future because he had to check one by one with a magnifying glass to see if there were valuable pearls.
Invertebrates are known to filter seawater to obtain the nutrients they need, but sometimes inhale foreign objects such as parasites. In order to protect themselves, such animals will use a substance called mother-of-pearl (Nacre) to wrap foreign objects, eventually forming a small, hard, spherical object, also known as a pearl.
