Colombia is making a concerted effort to expedite the retrieval of a valuable sunken treasure, worth an estimated $4 billion to $20 billion, which has been at the center of a lengthy legal dispute regarding its ownership. President Gustavo Petro has directed his administration to retrieve the treasure, known as the “Holy Grail of shipwrecks,” from the Caribbean Sea as swiftly as possible, aiming to achieve this before his term concludes in 2026.
The treasure is believed to originate from the Spanish galleon San José, a 62-gun, three-masted ship that sank during a battle against British ships on June 8, 1708, during the War of the Spanish Succession. For centuries, the shipwreck remained a legendary enigma due to the unknown location.
The core issue in the ownership dispute revolves around the entity that initially discovered the shipwreck. In 1981, a US company named Glocca Morra asserted that it had located the treasure and shared its coordinates with Colombia under an agreement entitling the company to half of the fortune upon recovery. However, in 2015, then-President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia announced that the country’s navy had found the San José wreck at a different location on the seabed.
Sea Search Armada, the US company that evolved from Glocca Morra, contends that the Colombian government found part of the same debris field in 2015 that the company had originally discovered in 1981. It is suing the Colombian government for what it estimates to be half of the treasure’s value, amounting to $10 billion, under the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement.
The legal dispute has generated substantial uncertainty regarding the true ownership of the treasure, and Colombia has not disclosed the precise coordinates of the shipwreck’s final resting place. Colombia is now planning to create a public-private partnership to accelerate the retrieval of the treasure. President Petro has set the objective of bringing the sunken treasure to the surface before the end of his term in 2026. The precise value and ownership of this historically significant treasure remain in a legal quagmire, but its recovery has become a top priority for the Colombian government.
President Gustavo Petro ordered his administration to exhume the “holy grail of shipwrecks” — the Spanish galleon San José — from the floor of the Caribbean Sea as soon as possible to retrieve the possible ‘treasure’. https://t.co/UDOOp2YlMc
— CJ4America2 (@GrammyC4Zone2) November 6, 2023
