The case is still in a Colombian superior court. Colombian Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez said in a statement in June that “Sea Search Armada has no right over the San José galleon or its contents” because the coordinates where they claim to have found the galleon don’t match its actual location. American salvage company Sea Search Armada (SSA) stated they’d found the ship in the early 1980s and claimed 50% of its contents, which SSA says was an agreement with Colombia at the time – and which the Supreme Court of Colombia ruled in favour of in 2007.įormer Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos didn’t credit SSA when he announced Colombia had found the galleon in 2015.
Moreover, the San José has been entangled in legal battles for nearly 40 years. Spain has shown interest in claiming part of the galleon, as has the Bolivian indigenous nation Qhara Qhara whose land (once part of the Viceroyalty of Peru) the San José’s riches were extracted from. But despite the San José galleon being found in Colombian waters, there’s no guarantee it will stay within its borders. There are an estimated 1,000 ships sunk off the coast of Colombia, waiting to be discovered. Zuñiga’s theory is that instead of surrendering the San José and returning to Spain empty-handed, its captain could have ignited the gunpowder on the ship and exploded the galleon himself. However, it’s undeniable that neither side wanted the galleon and its treasures to sink. ” The galleon could have lost a sail, he said, or the passengers could have revolted against the captain – most were civilians and weren’t under anybody’s orders. we don’t know what condition the San José was in during its last. “The San José was winning the battle,” explained Zuñiga. The British Navy – armed with pistols, swords and knives – tried three times to board the galleon and take it as their own, said Gonzalo Zuñiga, a curator at the Naval Museum of the Caribbean in Cartagena. And by the evening of 8 June, a battle for the San José’s treasure had begun. The galleon’s captain, Jose Fernandez de Santillan, knew that the British, who were involved in the war, might have ships waiting to attack in Cartagena the city was only meant to be a quick stop to repair the San José before its longer journey to Havana, Cuba, and then on to Spain. The riches were destined for King Philip V of Spain, who relied on resources from his colonies to finance the War of the Spanish Succession. It was laden with gold, silver and precious stones extracted from what was then Spanish-controlled Peru, which have been estimated to be worth between $10bn and $20bn today.
The San José galleon left Panama’s port city of Portobelo in late May 1708. We don’t know how much is actually in the San José galleon. “This is the magical realism that exists in our country. “The Caribbean is very magical,” said Bibiana Rojas Mejía, a traveller I spoke to from Bogota who spent the day at the beach with her family on Isla Grande, the largest of the islands. Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez wrote about the galleon in Love in The Time of Cholera the novel’s main character, Florentino Ariza, planned to dive down and retrieve the San José’s riches for his lifelong love. In fact, the real-life treasure ship has long been the subject of fascination. While being carried across the sea, it’s difficult not to imagine the San José and its treasure, somewhere out there below. Throngs of small motorboats zoom over the waters as they transport beach-going tourists to the islands each day. But the San José is said to be located close to the Rosario Islands, a tropical archipelago and national park 40km from Cartagena. The Colombian government hasn’t revealed the exact location of the famed galleon, which is often called the “holy grail” of shipwrecks.
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