[mckerney]

Treasure from sunken galleon must be returned to Spain, judge says | World news | guardian.co.uk

It is one of the greatest underwater treasure troves of all time, a glittering haul of gold and silver recovered from a mysterious sunken Spanish galleon and secretly flown across the Atlantic to the US.

But now an epic battle over ownership of 594,000 gold and silver coins scattered on the ocean floor has ended with victory for the Spanish government, with the American treasure-hunter Odyssey Marine Exploration ordered to send the valuable haul back home.

A jubilant Spanish government announced on Wednesday that the $500m-worth (£308m) of gold and silver coins found at a site that Odyssey called "Black Swan" would be back on Spanish soil within 10 days.

"This sentence gives Spaniards back what was already theirs," said the culture minister, José Ignacio Wert. "There is a space of 10 days in which the coins must be returned."

The court decision puts an end to nearly five years of intrigue on the high seas since Odyssey scooped the precious haul from the Atlantic seabed in May 2007. To the fury of Spanish authorities it secretly landed the trove in Gibraltar and flew it out in chartered aircraft to its base in Florida.

A American circuit court judge has upheld a decision by Atlanta judge Mark Pizzo, who had declared the trove came from the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a Spanish frigate sunk by a British squadron off Cape St Mary, Portugal, in October 1804.

The judge rejected Odyssey's argument that there was no clear wreck site, with the coins scattered so widely it was impossible to say exactly which vessel they came from.

The treasure-hunting company, he said, had set out to find the Mercedes and had clearly done so.

Pizzo argued that the coins, all dated prior to 1804, matched the Mercedes' cargo of coins minted in Lima, Peru – part of a haul being brought back to finance Spain's European wars. He also said cannon found there matched those on the Mercedes.

I'm really hoping that Peru manages to successfully demand the golds return from the Spanish.