Reaching the San José holy grail of shipwrecks

HostI grew up hearing stories about ships full of gold lost at the bottom of the sea, but it always felt like something from a movie. Then I heard about this real ship sitting off the coast of Colombia that has been there for three hundred years. It was full of gold and silver when it sank, and for a long time, it was basically a ghost story that nobody could quite track down. I would love to know how we finally went from tall tales to actually finding it on the seafloor.

GuestIt's a wild story because for decades, people were basically guessing where it was. This ship, the San Jose, went down in seventeen oh eight during a huge sea battle with the British. It was the big prize of the Spanish fleet, carrying wealth that would be worth billions of dollars today. But it didn't just sink, it blew up. So, you're not looking for a whole ship sitting perfectly on the sand. You're looking for a debris field spread out across the dark, deep ocean floor. For a long time, treasure hunters claimed they found it back in the eighties, but the Colombian government said they were looking in the wrong spot. It wasn't until twenty fifteen that a team using some very smart robots finally spotted the bronze cannons with dolphins carved on them. Those cannons were the smoking gun that proved they had the right ship.

HostWait, if the treasure hunters said they found it forty years ago, was the new find just a few miles away, or were those first guys just making it up?

GuestWell, that's the billion dollar question. The group from the eighties, called Sea Search Armada, says they gave the government the right coordinates and that the new find is in the same area. But the government says no, this was a totally new discovery in a different spot. To find it this time, they used a self-driving underwater robot called a REMUS six thousand. This thing is shaped like a yellow torpedo and can dive four miles deep. It uses sound waves to paint a picture of the sea floor. The team had to scan huge areas of the bottom, which is incredibly slow work. They were looking for any bump or shape that didn't look like a rock. When they finally saw those cannons through the robot camera, they knew they had hit the jackpot. It was sitting about two thousand feet down, which is way too deep for any human diver to ever reach.

HostTwo thousand feet is a long way down. I guess you can't just send a guy in a suit with a bag to start picking up gold bars. What does the site actually look like right now?

GuestIt looks like a huge, messy pile of history. You have to picture thousands of items scattered everywhere. There are tea cups, jars, and bottles that are still in one piece after three centuries. Then, of course, there's the treasure. We're talking about millions of gold coins, silver, and crates of emeralds. Some people think the total value could be twenty billion dollars. But because it's so deep, the water is freezing and there's no light. That actually helped keep things in good shape. The wood is still there, and the clay pots are just sitting in the silt. Recently, the Colombian government started a new mission to use robots to lift some of these items up without breaking them. They're using these tiny, delicate robotic arms to pick things up one by one.

HostIt sounds like a dream for a treasure hunter, but calling it a jackpot feels a bit weird if it's a site where hundreds of people died. Is this really a scientific mission, or is Colombia just trying to get paid?

GuestThat's where the friction comes in. Colombia has declared the ship a national treasure and says they're doing this for science and history, not for money. They want to build a museum to show everything off. But they're also in a huge legal fight. Spain says the ship belongs to them because it was a Spanish navy vessel. Then you have the group from the eighties saying they deserve a cut because they pointed the way. On top of that, there are indigenous groups in South America who say the gold and silver were stolen from their mines in the first place. They feel the wealth belongs to their people, not to a government. So, while the robots are doing the physical work of reaching the ship, the lawyers are the ones doing the heavy lifting in court.

HostIt feels like everyone is fighting over a grave. If the indigenous groups say the silver was taken from their land by force, does that change who's allowed to touch it?

GuestIt complicates everything. The Qhara Qhara people in Bolivia have been very vocal about this. They say their ancestors were forced to work the mines that filled the San Jose. To them, the ship isn't just a wreck or a prize, it's a piece of their own stolen past. They want a seat at the table to decide what happens to those coins. Colombia is trying to balance all of this while moving forward with the recovery. They're calling this phase a scientific study to see how the items react when they leave the water. If you bring up a piece of wood that has been underwater for three hundred years and don't treat it right, it can basically crumble into dust in your hands.

GuestThe latest move is using a special underwater camera that can see in extremely high detail, allowing them to map every single coin and bone before anything is moved.

HostThe yellow robot found the cannons, but it seems like the real struggle is deciding if that gold belongs to the people who mined it, the people who lost it, or the people who finally found it on the map.