Which diamond mines are still operating in South Africa in 2026?

Cullinan, east of Pretoria, is the only large South African diamond mine running normally in August 2026. Venetia in Limpopo is still the country's biggest producer, but its owner announced on 13 July 2026 that it would pause production there for two years. Finsch in the Northern Cape was placed in business rescue on 29 May 2026 and its operations were suspended in June. The Kimberley pipes, run as the Ekapa operation, are on care and maintenance in provisional liquidation. Alexkor's state joint venture on the Namaqualand coast, some Orange River alluvial and marine workings, and a handful of small permit-scale operations make up the rest.

Is the Cullinan diamond mine still operating?

Yes. Cullinan, in Gauteng, was still producing through the financial year that ended on 30 June 2026, when it recovered 1,398,604 carats at an average price of US$106 a carat. It is owned 74 percent by Petra Diamonds, 14 percent by Kago Diamonds and 12 percent by an employee trust. The mine opened in 1902 as the Premier mine and was renamed in 2003. It produced the 3,106 carat Cullinan Diamond in 1905 and is still the world's most reliable source of large blue stones. Its owner has said it has potential to continue into the late 2040s, though a revised business plan was due in September 2026.

Is the Venetia diamond mine closing?

Not permanently, on the stated plan. On 13 July 2026 De Beers announced a two-year pause in production at Venetia, in Limpopo, and issued a section 189A retrenchment notice covering 1,214 employees, 1,134 of them at the mine itself. The company said it would confirm the exact timeline after consulting employees, and that capital spending on the underground project would be rephased rather than cancelled. The underground development, which cost about US$2.3 billion, is designed to run the mine to 2046 and yield roughly 81 million carats. Venetia has accounted for around 40 percent of South African diamond output.

Can you still visit the Big Hole in Kimberley?

Yes. The Kimberley Mine, universally called the Big Hole, is a museum and tourist site, not a working mine. Digging began in mid-July 1871 and stopped on 14 August 1914. The open excavation covers about 17 hectares, is roughly 463 metres across and was dug to about 240 metres before debris and water reduced the visible depth to about 175 metres. Underground workings below it reached 1,097 metres. Over 22 million tonnes of rock came out of it. The often repeated claim that it is the largest hand-dug excavation on earth has been contested, with researchers pointing at Jagersfontein and Bultfontein.

Is South Africa still the world's biggest diamond producer?

No, and it has not been for a long time. Kimberley Process figures for 2025 put South African production at 5,572,542 carats worth US$598.6 million, which is about 5.6 percent of world carats and 6.5 percent of world value. That ranks sixth on both measures, behind Russia, Botswana, Angola, Canada and, by volume, the Democratic Republic of Congo. The direction is clear over twenty years: South Africa produced 15.2 million carats in 2007 worth US$1.42 billion, so the country now digs roughly a third of the volume it did then, for well under half the money.

What happened to the diamond mines in Kimberley?

The original Kimberley Mine stopped in 1914 and never reopened. The other pipes in the cluster, Du Toitspan, Bultfontein and Wesselton, kept going in one form or another for more than a century, latterly as an underground and tailings retreatment business known as Ekapa. In February 2026 a mud rush at Du Toitspan killed five miners. The companies were placed in provisional liquidation in March 2026, and by mid-2026 the operation sat on care and maintenance with about 115 people on site and its liquidators running a sale process with offers due on 14 August 2026.

Are South African diamonds cut and polished in South Africa?

Mostly not. Most South African rough leaves the country uncut. The State Diamond Trader's own reporting gives the shape of it: only 18 percent of the carats it offered were judged economically suitable for cutting here, though those carats carried 68 percent of the value. That is why why new rules published in March 2026 require rough to be displayed for at least four days at the Diamond Exchange and Export Centre in Johannesburg before an export permit is approved. The State Diamond Trader, which may buy up to 10 percent of run-of-mine production, reported that in the year to March 2025 only 18 percent of the carats it sold on were deemed economically suitable for cutting in South Africa, although those carats represented 68 percent of its sales value.

Does buying a diamond in South Africa make it cheaper because it is mined here?

No. Mine production is sold as rough into a global market and priced in dollars, so where the stone came out of the ground has almost no bearing on what a polished stone costs on a South African counter. What moves the number is the specification, the trading level you buy at and the markup convention applied. The retail convention is keystone, roughly double the trade cost, and around three times at branded showrooms, while margins between one trade level and the next are commonly 3 to 5 percent. Proximity to a mine is not a discount.

Diamond Mines in South Africa

Bottom line up front

One large South African diamond mine is running normally in August 2026. That is Cullinan. The rest of the list, in plain form:

Cullinan, Gauteng. Operating. The only major mine not currently suspended, paused or in a formal insolvency process.
Venetia, Limpopo. Still the country’s largest producer, but a two-year production pause was announced on 13 July 2026, with a retrenchment notice covering 1,214 people.
Finsch, Northern Cape. Placed in business rescue on 29 May 2026, operations suspended in June.
The Kimberley pipes (Du Toitspan, Bultfontein, Wesselton), Northern Cape. Care and maintenance, in provisional liquidation, being sold by liquidators.
Alexkor’s state joint venture, Alexander Bay. Still mining land, beach and sea, and in acknowledged distress.
Orange River alluvial and offshore marine workings, Northern Cape. Active at small scale.
Small kimberlite permits, mostly Limpopo. Permitted, intermittent, price dependent.

Closed or finished: the Kimberley Mine (the Big Hole) in 1914, Jagersfontein in the early 1970s, Voorspoed in December 2018, Koffiefontein on care and maintenance since 2022.

That is the whole picture, and it is a much shorter list than most people expect from the country that invented the modern diamond industry.

If you came here on the way to buying something, the short version is this. None of the above changes what a ring costs. These mines are stopping because prices are weak, not because stones are scarce, and rough is sold into a global market priced in dollars, so standing near a pit is not a discount. The decision that does move your number is the level you buy at: a manufacturer, a cutting house or a dealer.

Cheaper. A retail counter buys at exactly that level and then applies keystone, roughly doubling the price, about three times at a branded showroom, while the steps between one trade level and the next run at 3 to 5 percent. Proximity to a mine is not a discount. Buying before that hop is.
Better. The specification most buyers want is about five times more common one step up the chain, 52 percent of trade-access stock against 9 percent of retail-held stock.
They do the rest too. Setting, bespoke commissions, resizing, re-tipping, insurance valuations, repairs and buy-back, usually on their own bench, which is where a counter without a workshop sends the job.

A counter earns the difference when the date will not move, when you want finished rings on a hand today, or when the name on the box is part of it.

The major South African diamond mines, and where each one stands

Mine	Location	Opened	Status in 2026	Notable for
Venetia	Limpopo, near Alldays	1992	Two-year production pause announced 13 July 2026	Largest South African mine; about 40 percent of national output
Cullinan	Gauteng, east of Pretoria	1902, as the Premier mine	Operating	The 3,106 ct Cullinan Diamond, 1905; the world’s main source of blue diamonds
Finsch	Lime Acres, Northern Cape	1967	Business rescue from 29 May 2026, operations suspended	High volumes of smaller commercial goods
Kimberley (Ekapa: Du Toitspan, Bultfontein, Wesselton)	Kimberley, Northern Cape	About 1870	Care and maintenance; provisional liquidation; sale process	Underground pipes plus about 140 Mt of tailings resource
Alexkor PSJV	Alexander Bay, Northern Cape	Opening date unverified	Operating, in distress	State-owned 51 percent with 49 percent held by the Richtersveld Mining Company; land, beach and sea
Koffiefontein	Free State	Unverified	Care and maintenance since November 2022; sold to Stargems in October 2024; restart unverified	Formerly a Petra mine
Voorspoed	Kroonstad, Free State	2008	Closed December 2018, in rehabilitation	De Beers’ last South African open pit, run for a decade
Jagersfontein	Free State	About 1870	Mining ended in the early 1970s; tailings site; dam failure 11 September 2022	The 2022 tailings collapse killed at least five people
Kimberley Mine, the Big Hole	Kimberley, Northern Cape	1871	Closed 14 August 1914; museum	The excavation that created the city and the company
Baken and Orange River alluvials	Northern Cape	Unverified	Baken reported on care and maintenance since 2018; sources conflict on ownership	Alluvial gem-quality stones
Thorny River and Marsfontein	Limpopo	Permit stage	Mining permit granted; Marsfontein on care and maintenance since October 2023	Small kimberlite blows near a depleted mine

Cells marked unverified are ones I could not confirm against a source I would stand behind.

2026 is not a normal year, and the numbers say so

Three things happened inside five months, and together they are the worst run South African diamond mining has had in decades.

In February 2026 a mud rush at Du Toitspan killed five miners. The Ekapa companies went into provisional liquidation in March, the Northern Cape High Court extended rather than finalised that order on 17 March, and the matter was postponed to 30 October. By mid-2026 the operation carried about 115 people on care and maintenance at a reported R10 million a month, with debts above R110 million and roughly 400 workers unpaid since November 2025.

On 29 May 2026, Finsch entered business rescue. Its owner was blunt about why: a large proportion of smaller goods, a strong rand, and a collapse in the price of exactly the size range Finsch produces. Its average price fell to US$64 a carat in the 2026 financial year from US$74 the year before. It produced 936,945 carats that year and then stopped.

On 13 July 2026, De Beers announced a two-year pause at Venetia and issued a section 189A notice covering 1,214 employees, 1,134 at the mine and 80 at its South African sales arm. The framing was capital discipline, not retreat: rather than push carats into a weak market, rephase the spending. That underground development, at about US$2.3 billion, is the largest single investment in South African diamonds in decades and is designed to run the mine to 2046 for roughly 81 million carats.

Behind all three sits one market. South Africa’s Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources recorded diamond sector sales value falling 19.2 percent in 2024 and sector employment down 7.2 percent in the same year, naming lab-grown oversupply among the causes. For the buyer-side version of that argument, the natural versus lab-grown page sets out what it has and has not changed at retail.

Where South Africa actually sits in world production

Here it is from the Kimberley Process, which certifies rough diamond trade and publishes the counts.

Year	South African production, carats	Value, US$	US$ per carat
2005	15,559,531	1.319 billion	84.78
2007	15,210,833	1.417 billion	93.18
2019	7,180,952	873.0 million	121.57
2023	5,891,885	793.9 million	134.75
2024	5,340,219	662.4 million	124.03
2025	5,572,542	598.6 million	107.43

Every figure in this table, including the per-carat column, is as published in the Kimberley Process annual global summaries. Nothing here is my own calculation.

In 2025 the world produced 98,824,614 carats worth US$9.23 billion. South Africa’s 5.57 million carats is about 5.6 percent of world volume and its US$598.6 million is about 6.5 percent of world value. On both measures the country ranks sixth, behind Russia, Botswana, Angola and Canada, with the Democratic Republic of Congo ahead on volume and Namibia ahead on value.

Read that as a trend rather than a set of points. Volume is roughly a third of what it was in 2007. Value is under half. And the 2025 figure predates Venetia pausing, Finsch stopping and Kimberley going into liquidation, none of which will show up until the 2026 count is published in mid-2027. The next number is going to be worse.

The Big Hole, and what Kimberley actually was

Digging at the Kimberley Mine started in mid-July 1871 and stopped on 14 August 1914. The excavation covers about 17 hectares, is roughly 463 metres across, and was dug to about 240 metres before debris and water brought the visible depth down to about 175 metres. Underground workings beneath it reached 1,097 metres. Over 22 million tonnes of rock came out, for a reported 2,720 kilograms of diamonds, which sources put at between roughly 13.6 and 14.5 million carats.

Put that in modern terms. Forty-three years of hand and steam-era mining at the most famous diamond mine in history produced somewhere near two and a half years of current total South African output. The pipes were extraordinarily rich, but the industry built on them was never about tonnage. It was about control of supply and of the route to market, a different asset entirely, and one that outlived the ore body by a century.

The claim that the Big Hole is the largest hand-dug excavation on earth is contested: researchers have argued that hand-dug portions of Jagersfontein and Bultfontein went deeper or wider. A good story with a disputed superlative.

The interesting gap: the ore is leaving, the skill is still here

Here is the part of the story that is genuinely unusual, and it is not nostalgia.

South Africa is a mid-sized producer that behaves like a trading centre. In 2025 it exported 7,328,169 carats of rough, considerably more than the 5,572,542 carats it mined. More striking, it imported 296,987 carats at US$1,101 per carat, against a world average import value of about US$97 a carat and the US$107 a carat South African ground actually yielded. Rough worth ten times the local average is coming into the country. Nobody imports at that price to store it.

Around that flow sits a real trading apparatus. The Diamond Exchange and Export Centre in Johannesburg handled tenders of about 4.5 million carats valued near US$851 million in the 2023/24 financial year, down from 5.2 million carats and US$1.2 billion the year before. 127 licensed beneficiators, meaning cutting and polishing businesses, used it that year, down from 133, and the regulator issued 715 diamond licences. The State Diamond Trader, entitled to buy up to 10 percent of run-of-mine production, inspected 5,582,855 carats worth US$633 million in the year to March 2025 and ended it with 88 registered clients.

Now the uncomfortable half, because it is the half that makes the argument honest. Of those 88 clients, only 20 bought anything that year, and the trader’s purchases fell 49 percent by volume in twelve months. Of the carats it did pass to local cutters, only 18 percent were deemed economically suitable for beneficiation in South Africa, though those carats carried 68 percent of the value. Its own annual report says plainly that most rough it can access is not economically suitable for cutting here. Roughly 90 percent of South African rough leaves uncut, which is why rules published in March 2026 now force rough to sit on display at the Johannesburg exchange for four days before an export permit is granted.

So the honest version of the gap is this. Volume left South Africa decades ago and is not coming back, because the pipes that made Kimberley are worked out and the new ones are in Botswana, Russia and Canada. What stayed is thinner than the beneficiation rhetoric suggests, but it is real: a licensed trading floor, a small population of businesses that can actually cut a stone, and people who buy and sell at trade level every week. The 18 percent figure and the US$1,101 import price are the same fact seen from two sides. The skill that survives is concentrated at the top of the quality range, because that is the only place where doing the work here still pays.

That matters for a buyer, because value in diamonds is not added where the stone comes out of the ground. It is added where someone decides which stone to buy, how it should be cut and what it is worth. That decision is still being made in Johannesburg. The stone in front of you probably was not.

What this means if you are buying a diamond in South Africa

Four consequences follow, and none of them is the one people expect.

Being near a mine is not a discount. Rough sells in dollars into a global market, and a polished stone on a South African counter is priced off the same international benchmarks as one in London or Mumbai. There is no local-produce dividend. The what a diamond costs page works through where the money goes.

“South African diamond” on a ticket is marketing unless it is on a document. Rough is mixed, sorted by category and traded several times before cutting, and country of origin is not on a GIA report. If origin matters to you, the ethical natural diamonds page explains what can and cannot be traced and the GIA page explains what a report does certify.

The 2026 disruption will not show up as a shop-floor price cut, and probably not as a rise either. Venetia and Finsch are a tiny fraction of world supply, and their owners have said other operations will cover the gap. South African mines are stopping because prices are weak, not because stones are scarce. Anyone using the Venetia pause to sell you urgency is selling you urgency.

The spread that matters is between trade level and retail counter, not between countries. The retail convention is keystone, roughly double the trade cost, and around three times at branded showrooms, while margins between one trade level and the next are commonly 3 to 5 percent. That single doubling is worth more than every mining fact on this page. It is not a criticism, it pays rent, stock, staff, insurance and a brand, but it is where your money goes. The dealers versus retailers page and the manufacturers page cover which tier is which, and sightholder versus beneficiation customer versus open market explains how sellers get stock.

Trading level also decides what is in the case. In my June 2026 study of 230 individually listed GIA-certified natural diamonds across six South African sellers, 52 percent of stones held by sellers with trade access met a premium specification of D to G colour and VS2 clarity or better, against 9 percent of retail-held stock. That is a difference in what is on the shelf, not a price comparison, and it is roughly a factor of five.

On price, keep the two products apart. Across 73 listings from 18 sellers in July 2026, 17 of them South African and 71 of the rows priced, a one carat finished ring in a premium showroom ran R105,000 to R428,000. That band includes the setting and rests on three listings of three different specifications, so it is the spread of showroom prices rather than one stone priced three ways. A loose one carat G/VS1, with no setting in it, is better derived from the published list: the Rapaport round list of 20 March 2026 prices that specification at $5,400 per carat, which at a discount off list, R16.50 to the dollar and 15 percent VAT gives roughly R72,000 to R92,000, with about R82,000 at 20 percent off. Method in the price index; the one carat page breaks it down by specification.

The filter that follows: a seller worth your time will quote a per-carat figure for a stated colour, clarity and cut grade without being pushed. Searching the price question itself, along the lines of what a diamond costs per carat in South Africa, surfaces the sellers who publish real numbers. Searching the industry’s own job titles does not. Run the buying checklist before any appointment.

What I could not confirm

Opening dates for Alexkor, Koffiefontein and the Baken alluvial workings. Sources disagree or are vague, so those cells are blank rather than guessed.
Whether Koffiefontein has restarted since the October 2024 sale, and who owns Baken. The Koffiefontein sale is confirmed, a restart is not. On Baken, one source says it was sold in 2017, another describes care and maintenance from late 2018 under the previous owner.
Current employment in South African diamond mining. The Minerals Council figure of 14,577 people is for 2022 and the 7.2 percent 2024 decline comes from a different publication. There is no clean 2025 number.
Whether Anglo American’s sale of De Beers completes. By mid-2026 it had not, more than one bidder remained, and the business was not classified as held for sale in June 2026. Any statement about Venetia’s long-term owner is provisional.
The start date of the Venetia pause. De Beers said it would confirm the timeline after consulting employees.

Sources and references

Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, annual global summaries for 2005, 2007, 2019, 2023, 2024 and 2025, at kimberleyprocessstatistics.org. The 2025 table is dated 25 June 2026. Every production, import and export figure here comes from these tables.
State Diamond Trader Annual Report 2024/25, year ended 31 March 2025: purchases, client counts, beneficiation suitability.
SADPMR Annual Report 2023/24: licence counts and Diamond Exchange and Export Centre tender volumes. The four-day display rule is reported here, 18 March 2026.
South Africa’s Mining Sector Performance 2024, Report R141/2025, Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources.
Petra Diamonds Q4 and FY 2026 update, 28 July 2026, and its Cullinan page.
The Venetia announcement of 13 July 2026, via Rapaport and, for the section 189A notice, Mining Weekly, 14 July 2026. Project detail from this July 2026 update.
The liquidators’ Ekapa sale documentation, for the Kimberley pipes and the sale timetable.
Britannica on the Kimberley Mine, for the Big Hole’s dates, dimensions and tonnage, and the contested “largest hand-dug” claim.
My own 2026 studies: the June inventory study of 230 GIA-certified stones across six sellers, and the July price study of 73 listings across 18 sellers, 17 of them South African, with 71 of the rows carrying a price. Method in the price index.
Rapaport round brilliant price list, 20 March 2026, the published asking-price benchmark behind the loose-stone figure above, at $5,400 per carat for G/VS1 in the 1.00 to 1.49 carat bracket.

Statuses here are moving month to month, and several situations above are live court and consultation processes. Check the current position before relying on any status on this page. For how I research and correct these pages, see the editorial policy.

Diamond Mines in South Africa (2026): Which Ones Still Operate