OAN’s Elizabeth Volberding
5:50 PM – Tuesday, November 7, 2023
An operation to recover a 300-year-old sunken ship estimated to contain $20 billion worth of treasure has been initiated by the Colombian government.
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According to an interview on Wednesday with the Minister of Culture Juan David Correa, Colombian President Gustavo Petro urgently requested officials to exhume the Spanish galleon San José from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.
“This is one of the priorities for the Petro administration,” said Correa. “The president has told us to pick up the pace.”
On June 8th, 1708, the 62-gun Spanish ship was attempting to surpass a fleet of British warships in Colombia when it sank to the seafloor containing an assortment of treasure. It is often referred to as the “Holy Grail of Shipwrecks.”
The treasures on the ship contained gold, silver, and emeralds which were owned by private Peruvian and European traders.
The Spanish galleon carrying the trove of treasure is now about 700 feet below the water’s exterior near the Caribbean port of Cartagena.
The Colombian president would like to bring the Spanish galleon to the surface before his presidential term expires in 2026.
In order to do this, he asked for a public-private partnership to be established to launch the operation.
Additionally, there is much mystification surrounding the assortment of treasure contained on the sunken ship. The gold, silver and emeralds are estimated to be worth anywhere from $4 and $20 billion. The mystery of who is in ownership of the sunken treasure is also in question.
However, in 1981, Glocca Morra, a United States corporation, said that it found the trove of treasure and provided the reconciles to the Colombian government with the alleged agreement that the two were going to “split the treasure.”
Later, in 2015, Colombia’s former President Juan Manuel Santos claimed that the Colombian Navy worked with a company that discovered the shipwreck at a “different location” at the bottom of the sea.
Glocca Morra thought the wreck discovered by the Colombian Navy was a piece of the same debris field discovered in 1981.
Therefore, the U.S. company is now suing the Colombian government for the sunken treasure, which amounted to $10 billion — or half of what the treasure is estimated to be worth.
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