A sunken ship with $20 billion worth of treasure will be raised from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea: countries argue over who owns this treasure

Colombia hopes to speed up its mission to recover a three-century-old sunken treasure from the USS San Jose worth as much as $20 billion. Ownership of the estate is in legal limbo amid an ongoing legal battle, reports New York Post.

Photo: IStock

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has ordered his administration to raise the so-called "Holy Grail of shipwrecks" - the Spanish galleon San Jose - from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea as quickly as possible.

Petro wants to bring the 62-gun, three-masted ship to the surface before his term expires in 2026 and has asked to form a public-private partnership to see it through, Culture Minister Juan David Correa said Nov. 1.

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“This is one of the priorities of the Petro administration,” he said. “The President told us to pick up the pace.”

Legal issues

But according to the lawsuit, mystery surrounds the ownership of a huge trove of gold, silver and emeralds estimated to be worth between $4 billion and $20 billion.

The crux of the issue seems to revolve around who found the treasure.

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The galleon San José, with 600 crew on board, sank in approximately 600 m on June 8, 1708, during a battle with the British in the War of the Spanish Succession.

For many years it remained a legend because its exact location was unknown. Then, in 1981, the American company Glocca Morra claimed to have discovered the lost treasure and passed on its coordinates to Colombia. Colombia promised to give half of the fortune to the company when it was found.

Years later, in 2015, Colombia's then-President Juan Manuel Santos said the country's navy had discovered the wreck of the USS San Jose elsewhere on the seabed.

Colombia has never revealed the coordinates of the ship's site, but Glocca Morra, now called Sea Search Armada, believes that in 2015 the country discovered part of the same debris field that the company first discovered 34 years ago.

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The company is suing the Colombian government for half the treasure, or an estimated $10 billion, under the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement.

Government investigators visited the coordinates provided by Sea Search Armada and "concluded that there was no shipwreck there and no ship remains were found."

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