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When the San José made its final voyage from Seville, Spain, to America in 1706, the Spanish galleon was considered one of the most complex machines ever built.
But in an instant, the armed freighter went from a shining example of nautical architecture to what treasure hunters would consider the Holy Grail of shipwrecks. The San José was destroyed in a British ambush in 1708 in what is known as Wager’s Action, sinking off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia, with a haul of gold, jewels and other goods that today could be worth more than 20 billion dollars.
Some experts say that figure is grossly inflated. But the myth built around the San José has led the Colombian government to keep its exact location secret as a matter of national security.
Now Colombian President Gustavo Petro wants to accelerate a plan to bring the ship and its contents to the surface, and everyone wants a piece. It is the latest maneuver in a decades-long drama that has pitted treasure hunters, historians and the Colombian government against each other.
Petro has instructed the Ministry of Culture to create a public-private partnership to recover the ship, with a view to bringing at least part of the ship ashore by the end of his first term in 2026.
Juan David Correa, Minister of Culture, said in an interview that the government plans to open a bidding process in three or four months. He said the government was also considering building a museum and laboratory to study and display the ship’s contents. Bloomberg He previously reported renewed urgency around the plan.
“We need to stop thinking of this as a treasure. “It is not a treasure in the sense of the 19th century,” Correa said. “This is a submerged archaeological heritage and is of cultural and critical importance for Colombia.”
But more than 300 years after the ship sank, the plan to bring the San José to the surface is plagued by conflict.
Archaeologists and historians have condemned the effort, arguing that disturbing the ship would do more harm than good. Multiple parties, including Colombia and Spain, have claimed the San José and its contents. Indigenous groups and local descendants of Afro-Caribbean communities argue that they are entitled to reparations because their ancestors extracted the treasure.
Perhaps the largest and most enduring conflict is in the hands of an international arbitrator in London.
The matter has been entangled in legal proceedings since 1981, when a search group called Glocca Morra claimed to have found the San José. According to court documents, the group handed over the coordinates to the Colombian government with the understanding that it was entitled to half of the treasure.
Among other discoveries were wooden objects, according to court documents. Carbon dating indicated the wood was probably 300 years old.
With changing Colombian laws, Glocca Morra has found himself defending his right to the treasure for decades. The conflict deepened in 2015, when the Colombian government said it had found the wreck in a different location, one that Glocca Morra’s new owners, Sea Search Armada, say is a mile or two from their own coordinates.
Sea Search Armada, a group of American investors, is challenging a 2020 law change that “unilaterally converted everything on the ship into government property,” Rahim Moloo, a lawyer representing the group, said in a statement. If Colombia “wants to keep everything in the San José,” he said, “it can do so, but it has to compensate our customers for finding it in the first place.”
The group is asking for what it estimates to be a treasure worth $10 billion.
What exactly lies beneath remains a mystery.
For clues, historians have looked to the San José’s sister ship, the San Joaquín, which was sailing alongside the San José when it sank. The San Joaquín left Spain with about 17 tons of coins from Peru, among other items.
“We don’t know how the materials survive after three centuries of being submerged in water,” said Correa, the culture minister, adding that the government would evaluate some pieces at first before proceeding with a full excavation.
“They are pieces of great cultural importance that can give us an account of our colonial past,” he stated. “We are going to do it as quickly as possible following the president’s order, but also in the most professional and technical way possible.”
Because the wreck is so deep, at least several hundred meters below the surface, “human life cannot reach there,” Correa said. Any type of recovery would require underwater submersibles or robotics.
But Ricardo Borrero, a Bogotá nautical archaeologist who has written a forthcoming paper on the San José, said any kind of disturbance would be “ill-advised” and intrusive, and would carry more risks than rewards.
“The shipwreck lies there because it has reached equilibrium with the environment,” he said. “The materials have been in these conditions for 300 years and there is no better way for them to rest.”
Borrero said that an examination of the San José’s trajectory, an estimate of its speed and barometric charts of the area indicate that the ship is between 200 and 700 meters below the surface. But images taken on several government dives show life among the remains, including fish, suggesting that light can penetrate to a depth where photosynthesis can occur.
“Life is a clue that it is not as deep as they say,” he said.
Borrero said estimates that the treasure is worth up to $20 billion are questionable and that its value has been “overly exaggerated.” Historical documents of the San Joaquin, for example, show that it had “significantly less” cargo on board, Borrero said, about a tenth of the estimated value for the San José.
Instead of moving the ship, Borrero said the San José should be left intact on the seafloor, where it presents an opportunity for researchers to examine a prime example of globalization.
“Shipwrecks are the best way to inform us about the production, accumulation and distribution of goods in the past. “It’s like a floating city,” he said, noting that the tests can reveal how people navigated the seas down to what cut of meat they preferred. “The history of global trade can be reconstructed.”