The Atocha

Recovered in 1985, and still the richest shipwreck salvage in history

Nuestra Señora de Atocha, named for the basilica of Our Lady of Atocha in Madrid, was a Spanish galleon built in Havana in 1620: 550 tons, 112 feet long, heavily armed, and sailing as the almirante, the rearguard of the treasure fleet. In 1622 she was loaded at Cartagena and Porto Bello with a cargo so large that it took two months to record and stow, silver from Bolivia, Peru and Mexico, gold and emeralds from Colombia, pearls from Venezuela, worked silver, tobacco, indigo and bronze cannon, worth by modern estimates somewhere between $250 and $500 million.

The convoy of 28 ships left Havana for Spain on 4 September 1622, six weeks late, and on the second day a hurricane caught it in the Florida Straits. By the morning of 6 September eight ships had gone down, strewn from Marquesas Key to the Dry Tortugas. Of the Atocha's 265 people only three sailors and two slaves survived, clinging to the mizzenmast. Among the dead was Bartolomé García de Nodal, explorer of the waters around Cape Horn.

She lay in about 17 metres of water, but a second hurricane on 5 October broke her up and scattered the wreck. For years Spanish salvors worked the site with a brass diving bell, forcing enslaved divers down to bring up what they could, and recorded their deaths as a business expense. They recovered much of the Santa Margarita nearby, but in 60 years of searching they never found the Atocha. The loss was a heavy blow to a Crown already borrowing to fight the Thirty Years' War.

Beginning in 1969 the American treasure hunter Mel Fisher and his company, Treasure Salvors, searched for sixteen and a half years. They found parts of the Santa Margarita in 1970 and silver bars from the Atocha in 1973, and in 1975 Fisher's son Dirk found five bronze cannon bearing her marks. Florida claimed a quarter of everything found, but on 1 July 1982 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Treasure Salvors, giving it rights to all the treasure. Then in 1985 Fisher's son Kane radioed headquarters from the salvage boat Dauntless that they had found the main body of the cargo.

The haul ran to some 40 tonnes of gold and silver and 32 kilograms of emeralds, and in 2014 Guinness named it the most valuable shipwreck ever recovered, a title since overtaken by the San José. The sterncastle, where the most precious cargo would have been kept, has never been found, and the finds keep coming: an emerald ring in 2011, a silver bar in June 2026. Many are on show at Mel Fisher's Treasure Exhibit in Key West.