Colombia shipwrecks: Authorities release new images of sunken treasure

The footage was taken during four observation missions by the Colombian navy, using a remotely operated vehicle sent to a depth of some 3,100 feet off the country’s Caribbean coast. The eerie blue-and-green images show gold coins, pottery and intact porcelain cups scattered on the seafloor. They provide a glimpse of the ship’s treasure, thought to be worth billions in today’s dollars.

The vehicle also found the wrecks of a colonial boat and a schooner thought to date to about 200 years ago, to the period shortly after Colombia’s war of independence from Spain.

The San José, a 64-gun galleon with 600 people aboard, belonged to King Philip V of Spain. It sank near Cartagena in 1708 while battling the British navy during the War of Spanish Succession.

The ruined ship has been thought to contain one of the most valuable treasure troves ever lost at sea — a cargo of gold, silver, emeralds and other expensive objects taken from Spain’s colonial empire that could be worth more than $17 billion in current value.

The storied galleon has been the subject of popular imagination for years, even featuring in the novel “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez.

Treasure hunters had long tried to locate its remains, with an American company joining the search with Colombia’s permission in the 1980s and claiming to have discovered the site of the wreck.

President Iván Duque shared the news of the fresh images and additional wrecks during a televised announcement Monday.

“The equipment that our army has acquired and the level of precision have kept this treasure intact, but at the same time, we will be able to protect it for later extraction,” he said.

The remote exploration vehicle was the product of years of work, said Gabriel Alfonso Pérez, commander of the Colombian navy.

“During the previous years, we made four expeditions, which allowed us from the surface to verify that the area where the galleon San José is located had not been touched by human intervention,” Pérez said.

The ship has been at the center of protracted legal battles, with Colombia, Spain, an American company and a Bolivian Indigenous group all vying for the right to its treasure.

Spain, citing a UNESCO convention, claims rights to the destroyed ship because it belonged to the Spanish navy three centuries ago and the remains of hundreds of Spanish sailors lie in the wreckage.

The Qhara Qhara Indigenous group in present-day Bolivia says it should get the treasure because Spanish colonizers forced its ancestors to mine some of the precious metals it says were aboard.

Meanwhile, the U.S. firm Sea Search Armada, which claims to have found the San José in 1983, has sued the…