History & Culture
The San José, a treasure galleon of the Spanish navy, sank in 1708. A legal battle over ownership of its gold, silver, and gemstones is still underway.
ByTom Metcalfe
Published November 21, 2023
• 8 min read
Recent news reports that the president of Colombia hopes soon to recover treasure from the San José treasure galleon have brought new attention to the much-disputed wreck, which is often described as “the world’s richest.”
All agree that San José—a 62-gun galleon of the Spanish navy—was laden with up to 200 tons of gold, silver, and uncut gemstones when it sank in 1708, about 10 miles off the Colombian coast, during a battle with British warships.
Such a treasure could now be worth billions of dollars.
San José was leading a fleet of 18 ships, many of them packed with the riches of the New World and bound for France, which was at that time allied with Spain.
But it encountered a squadron of five British warships—the enemies of Spain and France during the War of the Spanish Succession.
After more than an hour of fighting, San José blew up and sank when its store of gunpowder exploded; another galleon was captured, but most of the rest of the Spanish fleet fled to safety in the harbor at Cartagena.
Colombia’s government now claims that it owns the San José wreck and all it contains, and culture minister Juan David Correo recently told Bloomberg that president Gustavo Petro wants it recovered by the end of his term in 2026.
“This is one of the priorities for the Petro administration,” Correa said. “The president has told us to pick up the pace.”
Rival claims
Colombia announced in 2015 that its searchers had found the San José wreck, although allegedly at a different location than where a U.S.-based salvage company had claimed to have found the wreck in 1982.
That’s led to the company filing a $10 billion claim, accusing Colombia’s government of trying to avoid its agreement to share half of any treasure recovered from the wreck.
The legal case is now in arbitration—the company argues the new location is close to the site it identified in 1982—and the first session is due to be held in Bogotá in December, according to researcher Daniel de Narváez.
The dispute may be one of the government’s biggest problems over San José, in part because any legal judgement will stand even if the wreck’s treasures are never recovered, he says.
“If I was the president, I would sit down and agree something with these people.”
De Narváez, a mining engineer by training, is a Bogotá -based director of the Professional Marine Explorers Society who advocates that shipwrecks should be partially commercialized by allowing people to sell wreck artifacts like gold coins.
He says such an arrangement would help protect the many historic wrecks in Colombia’s water, which are otherwise being pilfered by people too afraid to notify the government about them.
De Narváez is also a historian of San José whose calculations of its location influenced the 2015 search; and he helped draft a Colombian law classifying anything recovered from such wrecks as either commercial artifacts—which could be sold—or heritage artifacts, which could not.
The law doesn’t apply to the San José wreck, however, because a previous Colombian government had declared that everything on the wreck—including any treasure—is heritage that cannot be sold.
“As things stand today, if the president was to dive and recover a billion dollars’ worth of coins, he could not sell any of it,” De Narváez said. “It’s absolutely worthless.”
Law of the Sea
Colombia’s claims are challenged by Spain, which argues that it still owns San José because it was a Spanish naval vessel when it sank.
According to some lawyers, the wreck is protected under the 1982 International Convention on the Law of the Sea, which states that naval ships remain the property of their state even after they sink.
That would mean the wreck still belongs to Spain, although it sank more than 300 years ago in Colombia’s territorial waters.
But De Narváez notes that Colombia has never ratified the Law of the Sea convention, in part because of territorial disputes over its sea borders with Venezuela and Nicaragua: “For Spain, this would complicate things in a legal battle,” he says.
Maritime archaeologist Sean Kingsley, the editor-in-chief of Wreckwatch magazine, adds that the rule was implemented to protect modern wrecks from espionage, but it is being used here to claim a treasure wreck.
This is “a modern idea for protecting modern state secrets in nuclear warships, airplanes and submarines,” he says. “But there are no black boxes or naval secrets on a rotting wreck hundreds of years old.”
He notes that Spain’s colonial past could make it “hard to sympathize” with its claims.
“The San José’s cargo is linked to the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Native Americans and Africans, [who were] forced to work in terrible conditions in in Spain’s gold, silver and emerald mines,” he says.
Show me the money
Kingsley’s point leads to another claim to the treasures from San José, by a group of indigenous Bolivians who say their ancestors mined much of it.
According to a 2019 report, representatives of the Qhara Qhara people say Spanish colonialists forced their ancestors to mine silver from the mountain of Cerro Rico, and so the galleon’s treasure now belongs to them.
But De Narváez thinks the claim is weak. “I sympathize,” he says. “But from a legal standpoint I don’t see that claim being sustained.”
The disputes over ownership of the San José wreck highlight how much it might be worth.
Some reports say the treasure on the wreck could be valued at up to $20 billion, while others have settled on $17 billion.
However, De Narváez says the monetary value of the gold, silver, and uncut emeralds on San José don’t add up to the published figures, while Colombia’s constitution forbids the sale of heritage items.
“The calculations I have seen, by people who have looked into the cargo list, is something on the order of four to five billion dollars, rather than 20,” he says.
On the seafloor
Aside from questions of how much the wreck is worth, San José and its treasures are still at the bottom of the sea.
Some maritime archaeologists, including Ricardo Borrero of Bogotá, think it should stay there; he told the New York Times that any disturbance would be “ill-advised” and intrusive.
“The shipwreck lies there because it has reached equilibrium with the environment,” Borrero said. “Materials have been under these conditions for 300 years and there is no better way for them to be resting.”
But others think the wreck should be recovered for the historical and scientific value of its artifacts; and there’s an argument that the bulk treasure from the galleon could be sold to pay for the recovery.
The latest photographs show cannons and ceramic jugs—but no treasure—scattered around the sea floor where the galleon sank, reportedly at a depth of about 2,300 feet.
De Narváez notes that is too deep for human divers, but technically possible to recover using remotely-operated underwater vehicles and submarines.
However, he argues that the legal, technical, and archaeological concerns mean little could be brought up from the San José wreck by 2026.
“If you wanted to do a proper historical and archaeological recovery, it would probably take 10 years,” De Narváez adds.
Kingsley says there should be a realistic plan for the wreck’s management, including its scientific excavation and conservation.
“The San José has been found. It can’t be unfound,” he says. “It’s a dazzling find that can re-write the history of the age and inspire a generation.”
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