Holy grail of shipwrecks” discovered with one of most valuable hauls of treasure found in history
US scientists found a Spanish galleon laden with treasure worth up to £12.6bn at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, more than 300 years after it sank.
The San Jose, considered the holy grail of shipwrecks, was discovered three years ago off the coast of Colombia but few details were released at the time.
The 62-gun, three-masted galleon sank in June 1708, during a battle with British ships in the War of Spanish Succession, with the loss of nearly 600 lives.
Its treasure of gold, silver and emeralds has been described as the most valuable ever found and the precise location of the shipwreck was one of maritime history’s most enduring mysteries.
The galleon was discovered using an underwater autonomous vehicle operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the agency has now disclosed.
Colombia’s government announced in 2015 that the San Jose had been found but further details were only released this week with permission from the agencies involved in the search, including the South American country’s authorities.
“We’ve been holding this under wraps out of respect for the Colombian government,” said Rob Munier, WHOI’s vice-president for marine facilities and operations.
The US-based agency was invited to join the search because of its expertise in deep water exploration.
In 2011 the institute’s autonomous underwater vehicle, Remus 6000, helped find the wreckage of Air France 447, which crashed in 2009 several hundred miles off the coast of Brazil. The San Jose was found at a depth 600 meters using side sonar images taken by Remus 6000 in November 2015.