Colombia has recovered gold and bronze coins, a porcelain cup and a cannon from a sunken Spanish warship dubbed the “holy grail of shipwrecks.”
The artifacts are the first treasures to be recovered from the wreckage of the San José, a Spanish galleon that was sunk by the British Royal Navy in the Caribbean more than 300 years ago.
At the time of its sinking, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the San José had been carrying large amounts of gold, silver and emeralds from Spanish colonies in Latin American back to the Spanish king.
Collectively, those treasures are believed to be worth billions of dollars in today’s money and they are at the center of a heated legal dispute between the Colombian government and a US-based marine salvaging company named Sea Search-Armada (SSA).
Colombia maintains that it discovered the San José in 2015 with help from international scientists, but SSA, formerly known as Glocca Morra, claims to have found the shipwreck in the early 1980s and has launched a legal battle in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, claiming it is entitled to approximately $10 billion – roughly half the estimated value of the shipwreck’s treasure.
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