Colombia president to announce details of Spanish gold ship

Colombia’s president says searchers have found the wreck of a Spanish galleon that was sunk more than 300 years ago while carrying a big cargo of gold and precious stones. In a news conference on Saturday, Santos said the government would build a museum to display the findings, with sonar images so far showing cannons, arms, ceramics and other artifacts, according to Reuters.

The Spanish galleon was found “near Colombia’s Caribbean coast, in our waters, in an archaeological site that turned out to hold the flagship San Jose”.

The ship, called the San Jose, was part of the fleet of King Philip V as he fought the English during the War of Spanish Succession.

In a broadcast to the nation, Mr Santos said the discovery is the largest haul of national treasure ever lost at sea.

Santos said the discovery came “at sunrise last Friday, Nov. 27” during an operation of the Colombian Anthropology and History Institute, with the participation of the Colombian navy and several global scientists.

In 2011 a USA court declared the galleon property of the Colombian state. In 2007, the Columbian Supreme Court ruled that all proceeds from salvaging the shipwreck must be split between SSA and Columbia.

Two years later, Colombia’s government overturned well-established maritime law that gives 50 percent to whoever locates a shipwreck, slashing Sea Search’s take down to a 5 percent “finder’s fee”.

“The government may have been the one to find it but this really just reconfirms what we told them in 1982”, he told The Associated Press from his home in Barranquilla, Colombia.