In the depths of the Caribbean, a recent expedition dispatched a robot to a site long mythologised as the “holy grail of shipwrecks”. It surfaced with proof that the legends were true.
Rising up from over 600 metres came a cannon, three coins and a porcelain cup – the first glints of a hoard thought to be worth around $20bn.
“To be able to find, and be in front of, objects that have been submerged for 300 years, and which the last time they had been seen by humans was in a battle in the middle of the sea, it is very exciting,” said Alhena Caicedo Fernández, director of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History.
For 300 years the San José, a Spanish galleon that sailed from the port of Cadiz to the Americas, has rested undisturbed in cold, dark waters.
She set sail on March 10 1706 and reached Cartagena de Indias, a northern port city in Colombia, on April 27 that year, tasked with collecting treasure from Spain’s colonies. The voyage home two years later – meant to deliver those treasures to help fund the war of the Spanish succession – proved deadly.
In 1708, the British Navy ambushed the three-deck, 64-gun ship in the Battle of Barú. It sank off Cartagena, taking down with it a fortune in gold, silver and emeralds. Most of the crew and passengers, some 600 people, perished.
When Colombian researchers rediscovered the wreck in 2015, it immediately set off a tangle of legal and diplomatic disputes.
A US salvage group called Glocca Morra – later renamed Sea Search Armada – has argued that it first located the San José in 1981 and in 1982 handed over coordinates to the Colombian government under an agreement that would grant it half the treasure.
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Colombia disputes this, saying the coordinates do not match the site, which it found with the help of international scientists. Sea Search is demanding $10bn in compensation, which it says represents its 50% share.
Spain, meanwhile, claims the cargo outright because the San José was a Spanish naval vessel. Indigenous groups from Bolivia, along with descendants of African-Caribbean communities in the region, argue that they have a moral claim, too: much of the gold and silver on board was mined by their ancestors under brutal colonial conditions.
“The memory of our people is attached to those remains that rest on those sunken ships,” the Caranga, Chicha and Killaka peoples in Bolivia wrote in a letter last year.
Colombia has emphasised its desire to research, conserve and understand the ship’s history, rather than seize its fabled cargo. In 2020, it was formally declared a cultural heritage site.
“We need to stop thinking of this as treasure. It’s not treasure in a 19th-century sense,” Juan David Correa told the New York Times in 2023, when he was Colombia’s culture minister. “This is a submerged archaeological heritage and it is of cultural and critical importance for Colombia.” Perhaps it’s no surprise that the exact coordinates remain a state secret, guarded as fiercely as the riches it contains. The government hopes to build a museum dedicated to the 150ft vessel.
The retrieved items have been transferred to the Oceanographic and Hydrographic Research Center of the Colombian Navy. The coins have been identified as macuquinas, handmade Spanish coins in wide circulation by the end of the 16th century.
President Gustavo Petro was present when the items were collected aboard navy vessels. A presidential appearance for a handful of coins and a teacup may seem excessive. But when you’re dealing with a shipwreck worth billions, even the crockery gets VIP treatment.
Harriet Barber covers human rights abuses, migration, women’s rights and politics in South America
