When the San José made its final voyage from Seville, Spain, to the Americas in 1706, the Spanish galleon was considered one of the most complex machines ever built.
But in an instant, the armed cargo ship went from a brilliant example of nautical architecture to what treasure hunters would consider the Holy Grail of shipwrecks. The San José was destroyed in an ambush by the English in 1708 in what is known as the Wager’s Action, sinking off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia, with a cargo of gold, jewels and other goods that today might be worth more than 20 billion dollars.
Some experts say the number is wildly inflated. But the myth built around San José has pushed the Colombian government to keep its exact location secret as a matter of national security.
Now Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, wants to accelerate a plan to resurface the ship and its contents — and everyone wants a piece of it. It’s the latest maneuver in a decades-long drama that has pitted treasure hunters, historians and the Colombian government against each other.
Petro has tasked the Ministry of Culture with creating a public-private partnership to recover the vessel, with the aim of bringing at least part of the ship ashore by the end of his first term in 2026.
Juan David Correa, culture minister, said in an interview that the government plans to open a tender procedure within three or four months. He said the government is also considering building a museum and laboratory to study and display the ship’s contents. Bloomberg they had previously flagged renewed urgency around the plan.
“We must stop considering it a treasure. It’s not a treasure in the 19th century sense,” Correa said. “It is a submerged archaeological heritage and is of cultural and fundamental importance for Colombia.”
But more than 300 years after the ship sank, the plan to resurface the San José is fraught with conflict.
Archaeologists and historians condemned the effort, arguing that disturbing the ship would do more harm than good. Multiple parties, including Colombia and Spain, have laid claim to the San José and its contents. Indigenous groups and local descendants of Afro-Caribbean communities argue they are entitled to compensation because their ancestors mined the treasure.
Perhaps the greatest and most enduring conflict is in the hands of an international arbiter in London.
The matter has been embroiled in a legal process since 1981, when a search team called Glocca Morra claimed to have found the San José. According to court documents, the group handed over the coordinates to the Colombian government with the agreement that they would be entitled to half of the treasure.
Among other discoveries were wooden objects, according to court documents. Carbon dating indicated the wood was probably 300 years old.
With Colombia’s changing laws, Glocca Morra has found itself defending its right to the treasure for decades. The conflict worsened in 2015, when the Colombian government said it had found the wreck in a different location, one that Glocca Morra’s new owners, Sea Search Armada, claim is within a mile or two of their coordinates.
Sea Search Armada, a group of American investors, is challenging a 2020 law change that “unilaterally converted everything on the ship into government property,” Rahim Moloo, a lawyer representing the group, said in a statement. If Colombia “wants to keep everything to itself on the San José,” he said, “it can do that, but it has to compensate our customers for finding it in the first place.”
The group is asking for a treasure estimated to be worth $10 billion.
What exactly lies underneath is still a bit of a mystery.
To find clues, historians have looked for clues in the San José’s sister ship, the San Joaquín, which was sailing alongside the San José when it sank. The San Joaquín left Spain with approximately 17 tons of coins from Peru, among other items.
“We don’t know how the materials survive after three centuries of immersion in water,” said Correa, the culture minister, adding that the government will initially evaluate some pieces before proceeding with a full excavation.
“They are pieces of great cultural importance that can give us an account of our colonial past,” he said. “We will do this as quickly as possible following the president’s order, but also in the most professional and technical way possible.”
Because the wreck is so deep, at least several hundred meters below the surface, “human life can’t get there,” Correa said. Any type of recovery would require underwater submersibles or robotics.
But Ricardo Borrero, a nautical archaeologist in Bogota who wrote a soon-to-be-published paper on the San José, said any kind of disturbance would be “reckless” and intrusive, with more risks than benefits.
“The wreckage lies there because it has reached equilibrium with the environment,” he said. “The materials have been in this condition for 300 years and there is no better way to let them rest.”
Borrero said an examination of the San José’s path, an estimate of its speed and barometric charts of the area indicate that the ship is between 200 and 700 meters below the surface. But images taken during various government dives show life among the wrecks, including fish, suggesting that light is able to penetrate to a depth where photosynthesis can occur.
“Life is a clue that it is not as deep as they say,” he said.
Borrero said estimates that the treasure was worth as much as $20 billion were questionable and that its value had been “overly exaggerated.” Historic records of the San Joaquín, for example, show that there was “much inferior” cargo on board, Borrero said, on the order of about a tenth of the estimated value of the San José.
Instead of moving the ship, Borrero said the San José should be left intact on the seabed, where it will give researchers an opportunity to examine a prime example of globalization.
“Shipwrecks are the best way to inform us about the production, accumulation and distribution of goods in the past. It’s like a floating city,” she said, noting that tests can reveal how people navigated the seas to the cut of meat they liked. “You’re able to reconstruct the history of global trade.”