Planes Laden With Shipwreck Treasure Land In Spain

Spain needs money, I suppose they will make at least a big auction.
All the coins are from the same era it seems - so everyone buying those should be aware there is a bunch of similar ones.
I just hope they won't clean those coins too harshly before selling them ...

Well, that's a lot of similar coins to stick in a museum ... :D
Anyway, the value is very low compared that of the debt.

Sadly, a lot of musuems display only a fraction of their collections. Redundant coins have minimal research value, and if they're not on display--it's not much different than keeping them as a hoard back in antiquity.

Correct. Spain has no intention of ever selling any of those coins. Collectors will never see any of them, unless they are subsequently stolen from the Spanish museums - in which case their shipwreck provenance will be lost.

The whole point of Spain taking Odyssey to court was not so much to gain the treasure as to scare them, and all the other foreign treasure-hunters like them, away from ever investigating another Spanish shipwreck. Spain doesn't want it's shipwrecks salvaged, certainly not for profit, not by non-Spaniards and not by non-archaeologists.



I doubt the Spanish let journalists anywhere near the planes. If you want pics of the finds, look for the old articles from when the finds were first recovered, like this one from the BBC. Every one of those large white buckets is chock-full of Spanish dollars.



The Incan Empire was long gone by the time these coins were mined and minted. Debate about the ethics of the Spanish conquest of the Americas is moot; the fact is the invasion happened and the lands formerly part of the Empire were now part of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. These were Spanish coins being sent back to Spain on a Spanish warship when an unlucky shot from a blockading British warship (Spain and Britain were not at war at the time) saw the Spanish ship blow up before it could surrender.

Nevertheless, the Peruvian government did indeed put in a claim for the treasure, but they were thrown out of every US court they tried. The coins simply never belonged to Peru. Which is a shame, from a collector point of view, because the Peruvians probably would have auctioned off the coins to collectors.

Wow, they didn't lost time, they slabbed the most expensive coins (mint state it seems - gold don't care about water and sand if stored properly).

I can only guess that Odyssey Marine had coins slabbed?
This story irritates me every time I read it, LOL. The Spanish govt. may have "won" this time, but their lack of cooperation just promotes covert looting, imo.

Oh--ok, I stand corrected! There's more to this story than I read from articles.