A treasure worth billions was found in a shipwreck off South America

The Colombian government launched a project earlier this year to salvage a 300-year-old shipwreck estimated to hold treasure worth $20 billion. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has ordered his government to remove what he called the “holy grail of shipwrecks” – the Spanish ship San Jose – from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea as quickly as possible, the country’s culture minister told Bloomberg.

Petro aims to raise the wreckage of the three-masted, 62-gun ship to the surface before the end of his term in 2026 and is seeking to establish a public-private partnership to implement the project. According to a lawsuit, ownership of the ship’s vast gold, silver and emerald deposit, worth between $4 billion and $20 billion, is shrouded in mystery.

Now indigenous communities in Bolivia, the descendants of gold miners, are opposing the Colombian government’s plans to recover the remains of the 18th-century ship – and have called on Spain and UNESCO to intervene and stop the project . Colombia hopes to begin recovering artifacts from the wreck of the San Jose in the coming months, but the communities of Caranga, Chicha and Kilca in Bolivia maintain that the ship and its contents belong to them.

It is believed that much of the treasure aboard the San Jose was mined using forced labor by Bolivia’s indigenous peoples. Therefore, Colombia’s plans to recover the remains without consulting their descendants would violate international law, the communities said in a letter to UNESCO last week, accusing the effort “without our consent or our participation and without regard to which.” impact they will have on the present and future of our communities.

The 46-meter-long San Jose was carrying a large quantity of gold, silver and emeralds from Latin America back to Spain in 1708 when she was sunk off the coast of Cartagena by a British naval vessel. Since the wreck was found 600 meters underwater in 2015, the find has been the subject of international legal disputes, including an ongoing case in The Hague.

Colombia, Spain and private companies all claim ownership

Colombia, Spain and an American salvage company all claim ownership of the wreck – dubbed the “Holy Grail of shipwrecks” – and its cargo. The Colombian government announced in February that it would soon begin researching the shipwreck and hopes to eventually build a museum dedicated to the ship and the finds on it.

The government allocated $7.3 million for the first phase of research, which will require advanced technology robots to scan the seabed.

However, Bolivia’s indigenous communities claim that Colombia has no right to explore San Jose without involving the descendants of those who rented the precious metals found in the ship’s treasures. They believe much of San Jose’s cargo was mined in the Potosi mines in southern Bolivia, making it a “shared historical and cultural heritage.”