One of the world’s most sought-after, fought over and valuable shipwrecks has been found off the coast of Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos said Saturday.
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Rampietti said that Santos, despite his enthusiasm during the press conference, did not reveal many details about the discovery, saying that the exact location of the ship was now a state secret. The San José initially sank somewhere within the wide area off Colombia’s Baru peninsula, south of Cartagena.
The San Jose was part of a Spanish fleet that sailed to the Americas to load up with gold, silver, emeralds and other precious stones and metals.
The ship was sunk after being outgunned by a British ship as it left in the Caribbean, according to a history of the San Jose published by Sea Search Armada, a marine salvaging company that claims it found the ship in 1981.
The San Jose, a Spanish treasure galleon, was sunk by the British 300 years ago.
“Without a doubt, without any doubt, we have found 307 years after sinking, the galleon San Jose“, Santos said.
The ship, which maritime experts consider the holy grail of Spanish colonial shipwrecks, has also been the subject of a legal battle in the US, Colombia and Spain over who owns the rights to the sunken treasure.
The president said any recovery effort would take years but would be guided by a desire to protect the national patrimony.
SSA, whose subsidiary claimed in the early 1980s that it had found the galleon’s final resting place, was engaged in a long-running battle with the government of Colombia.
The company and the Colombian government agreed to split any proceeds from the wreckage, but the government later said all treasure would belong to Colombia, a view that was backed by a U.S. court in 2011.
Since 2013, the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History has been scanning the waters off the coast.
This undated picture released on December 5, 2015 by the Colombian Culture Ministry’s press office shows the remains of the Spanish galleon San Jose sunk off the Caribbean coast of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.
The biggest find, and the most sought after, was the San Jose, he said.
“I believe the ship’s side blew out, for she caused a sea that came in our ports”, he wrote.
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In Saturday’s video posted on the Colombian President’s Twitter account, an unidentified crew member is exuberant over the San Jose’s discovery.
