Decision on shipwreck’s treasure involves billions

BOGOTA, Colombia — Sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean just off Colombia’s coast is one of the Western Hemisphere’s richest treasures: a Spanish galleon packed with billions of dollars worth of New World gold, silver and emeralds.

The fight over who will profit from the San Jose shipwreck and its precious cargo — thought to be worth between $4 billion and $17 billion — has dragged on for almost four decades during legal challenges and allegations of back-stabbing, international espionage and unbridled greed.

On Monday, barring a last-minute court ruling or additional delays, the Colombian government will announce the name of the company or companies eligible to recover the vessel — and win the right to a significant portion of the San Jose’s riches.

However, the fight over its treasure is far from over.

In 2015, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced that a team of international researchers and the Colombian navy had found the “holy grail” of shipwrecks a few miles from the coastal city of Cartagena. He said the San Jose, sunk by the British in 1708, would be preserved and protected in a specially built museum.

There was just one cloud over the celebration. Sea Search Armada, a salvage company from Bellevue, Washington, said it had discovered the wreck in 1982 and had, as required by law, provided the coordinates to the Colombian government at the time.

In 2007, Colombia’s Supreme Court ruled that the company was entitled to half of all the treasure found at the coordinates it had provided — as long as the treasure wasn’t considered “national patrimony,” such as religious artwork or one-of-a-kind artifacts.

But the Santos administration contends that it found the shipwreck in 2015 independently of SSA’s research, working with international investigators and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. In addition, it says the San Jose wasn’t at the coordinates SSA provided 36 years ago — before GPS made underwater mapping a precise science.

“The Colombian government did not use any information that it already had on hand for this new finding,” the Ministry of Culture said in an email. “We can confirm that the (new) discovery is not at the coordinates provided by SSA in 1982.”