Art News

Spain rejects Peruvian government claim to multimillion-dollar shipwreck treasure

MADRID (AP).- Spain on Monday rejected Peru’s claim to a huge multimillion-dollar undersea treasure recovered from the wreckage of a ship that had left from Lima’s port more than 200 years ago. Spain recovered the nearly 600,000 coins — mostly silver but a few made of gold — on Saturday after they were flown to Madrid from the United States. That marked the culmination of Spain’s five-year battle in U.S. courts with a Florida deep-sea exploration firm that in 2007 found the remains of a ship believed to be the Spanish frigate Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes. The Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration found the shipwreck off Portugal near the Strait of Gibraltar, taking the booty first to the British colony of Gibraltar at Spain’s southern tip and then to Florida. On Monday, Spain’s education, culture and sports minister, Jose Ignacio Wert, told a packed news conference the final U.S. court ruling stated that “the legacy