November 16 - Cartagena, Spain and sunken treasure

Today we’re docked in Cartagena, a port city on the southeastern coast  of Spain in the region of Murcia. (This is the first of two Cartagenas I’ll visit on this voyage because in December I’ll be stopping in its namesake Cartagena, Colombia.)

This place holds some very old memories for me.  As a teenager my family lived in Spain and my father came to Cartagena often as part of his work.  We made a few trips with him, but that was long ago and this part of Spain has grown a lot.

Cartagena has a fascinating history. It was founded around 2500 years ago by the Carthaginians and its name is a variation of Carthage.  During the Punic Wars around 250 BC the city was captured by the Roman general Scipio Africanus.  Following the fall of the western Roman empire it was invaded by Visigoths and Vandals until the Moorish conquest of the Iberian peninsula.  It stayed in that civilization’s hands until the “Reconquista,” the period when the Christian kingdoms in what is now Spain united and began taking back the peninsula. The ouster of the Moors was completed by Isabella and Ferdinand in 1492.  During the years of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 Cartagena was a stronghold of the Spanish Republican faction, the side opposed to Franco and his Nationalists who eventually won the war.

The downtown area of Cartagena has many lovely buildings built in the early 20th century.  Today was not a good day to go and see them because they were having the Cartagena Marathon today so there are many streets blocked off for the runners and lots and lots of people here cheering their favorites on. I could only see a couple from afar because I didn’t know how to get around the barriers that were set up. 

These three photos are what the streets looked like blocked off for the runners.

The Museum of Underwater Archaeology

 Down by the waterfront  is the National Museum of Underwater Archaeology which displays many ancient artifacts recovered from shipwrecks in the surrounding waters.  The most significant part of the collection of the museum is the 14.5 ton cargo of an early 19th century vessel called the Nuestra Señora de  las Mercedes.  She was part of a flotilla of ships carrying gold, silver, hides and quinoa from Uruguay to Cádiz Spain.  The flotilla was intercepted by a British task force off the southern coast of Portugal. Despite the fact that the Britain and Spain weren’t at war at the time, a British frigate fired at the Spanish ships when they refused to alter course to be inspected and a single shot hit the magazine of the Nuestra Señora and she sank with the loss of her cargo and 250 sailors.  I’m writing about this because I find the story very intriguing and I remember reading something about it in the news years ago.  An American salvage company reported finding the shipwreck in 2007. The company recovered half a million gold and silver coins and took them back to the US.  Spanish researchers figured out that the items came from the wreck of their ship and they began a legal battle to recover the treasure.  Peru entered into the lawsuit claiming the Spanish plundered the treasure from them and said it was rightfully theirs. A US Circuit Court finally ruled in favor of Spain in 2012, and in late December of that year the treasure was brought to the museum here in Cartagena. A story about sunken treasure ships has got to be a good one.  The whole find and trial was even given a name that sounds like it came from a Pirates of the Caribbean movie – the Black Swan Project.