'Holy Grail' of Shipwrecks Is Caked in Gold and Controversy

Colombia's government is taking steps to recover the so-called "holy grail" of Spanish colonial shipwrecks—thought to hold up to $20 billion worth of gold, silver, and precious stones—from its waters and at the same time taking heat from others with claims to the centuries-old treasure. As CBS News reports, Colombia was a colony of Spain when the San Jose galleon, carrying treasures to the court of King Philip V from the Spanish colonies in Latin America, was sunk by the British navy off Cartagena de Indias in 1708. However, Colombia never signed the UNESCO convention, whose principle of sovereign immunity guarantees that a warship remains under a nation's flag after it has sunk, reports Vanity Fair.

In addition to Spain, the Qhara Qhara, an Indigenous group in Bolivia, claims ownership of the treasure, saying their ancestors were forced to mine the silver held within the San Jose, whose wreck was located near the Rosario Islands in 2015. Separately, US company Sea Search Armada claims Colombia promised it 50% of the treasure after it discovered the wreck's location, 200 meters deep, back in the 1980s. Colombia is having none of that. In announcing the 2015 discovery, then-president Juan Manuel Santos claimed the San Jose and its bronze cannons with unique dolphin engravings were found 600 meters deep in a location never surveyed before. "With the law of submerged cultural heritage, we can recover it," he added in 2018, per the BBC.

A government decree issued Thursday said companies or individuals hoping to get involved in the excavation need to sign a contract with the state, with any assets pulled from the wreck becoming part of a national registry, per CBS. But under a law passed by the Santos government, private contractors can keep up to 50% of the value of items not considered part of the country's heritage—and that can include duplicate coins and gems, per Vanity Fair. The excavation, expected to cost at least $70 million, is controversial for another reason. Most of the San Jose's 600 crew members died in the sinking and "one is not supposed to intervene in war graves," Stanford University archaeologist Justin Leidwanger told Live Science in 2015. (More shipwreck stories.)