Everyone wants the 'Oriflama' treasure, except Spain

The treasure that is preserved in the wreck of the

Oriflama

, the Spanish ship that sank off the Chilean coast in 1770, belongs to Spain.

This is how forceful the historian Vicente Ruiz García is, who, after seven years of research, concludes that the ship, which left the port of Cádiz bound for the viceroyalty of Peru loaded with half a million pieces from the Royal Glass Factory of the Farm of San Ildefonso, carried a load that belonged to the Royal Treasury of Carlos III.

The research of Ruiz García, who has received the Our America Award granted by the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), the University of Seville and the Diputación de Sevilla sheds light on a case that for two decades has confronted the Chilean Government with a company treasure hunter.

Already in 2010, UNESCO expressed its concern that the

Oriflama

was plundered by a commercial exploitation company.

After several trials, in 2016, the Chilean justice rejected a protection appeal filed by the firm Oriflama SA that claimed the extraction of the cargo.

Spain did not appear then in that lawsuit since it was not a warship, which would have granted sovereign immunity over it.

However, the researcher Vicente Ruiz (Úbeda, Jaén, 1973) urges the Spanish Government to now claim the rights that, it says, belong to it.

"The State must ask to be part of the investigation and, above all, demand a heritage that, beyond its economic value, has enormous historical and artistic significance," says Ruiz, who is also a professor at UNED and advisor to the Chair of Naval History and Heritage at the University of Murcia.

The

Oriflama

broke into several pieces on the day of its shipwreck at the mouth of the Huenchullami River.

Two centuries later the dynamics of the river covered the place with sand, and the earthquake in Chile a decade ago changed the environment again, so the remains of the wreck must be within a radius of 300 meters from the probe left by the treasure hunters and their drawers protected by tons of sand.

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The value of the cargo is incalculable, although it is known that it would be in the hundreds of millions of euros at the current market price.

For example, a cruet like the one carried by the

Oriflama

in the 18th century has a price of 500 euros at the Real Fábrica de Cristales de San Ildefonso.

The compelling reasons that lead the Jaen historian to defend the Spanish ownership of the

Oriflama

wreck

are that, in the absence of legitimate heirs of the ship's owners, the treasure must belong to the institutions that in their day contributed part of the cargo and today they are still standing, like the Spanish State.

According to the award-winning research, the ship was bought in Gibraltar by the Villanueva y Pico trading house and was renamed in 1762 as Nuestra Señora del Buen Consejo and San Leopoldo, although it kept the alias Oriflama.

Later it was acquired by the commercial house of Cádiz Uztáriz Hermanos y Compañía.

José Ignacio Vaillant y Hormaechea, sixth Marquis of Uztáriz, denied in his day that he was a direct descendant of the person who chartered the ship.

Vicente Ruiz's study has identified the cargo and its owners, the type of ship and its mission, its origin, its ownership at the time of its shipwreck disaster, thus ruling out possible claims from the other parties in dispute, such as the treasure hunting society that located the wreck at the beginning of this century, Chile and even France and the United Kingdom, under whose flag the

Oriflama once

sailed

.

Precedents in favor

Between the 16th and 19th centuries the Spanish Armada dominated the seas and brought shipments of gold and silver from its overseas territories, but many of them ended up shipwrecked outside of Spanish territory, in the case of the

Oriflama

in strange and tragic circumstances when it carried 176 people on board.

Professor Ruiz García has also relied on international jurisprudence that grants power to the original owners of boats.

In the case of Chile, it has a factor against it by not having adhered to the 2001 Unesco Convention on the commercialization of intangible cultural heritage, which would have granted it sovereign immunity over the ship.

The lawyers also agree that in order to claim the right to the wreck, it is essential to prove that the ship was serving the State at the time of its sinking.

"I agree with the thesis of the historian Vicente Ruiz, the Spanish State can claim the wreck if it can prove, as seems clear, that it was a State ship and that a large part of the cargo was publicly owned", underlines Juan Luis Pulido. , academic advisor of Martínez-Echevarría-Rivera Abogados.

In any case, it would not be the first time that a foreign court recognized the sovereign immunity of a shipwrecked galleon on its shores. In 2012 a judge from Florida (United States) recognized Spanish ownership of the frigate

Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes

, sunk in 1804 off the coast of Cádiz. The Odyssey treasure hunter, which looted the site in 2007, claimed that the remains of the ship were not identifiable. But after a long legal battle, the North American justice agreed with Spain when it was shown that it was a State ship thanks to the documentation provided by the Archivo de Indias and the Naval Museum of Madrid.