Researcher identified 8,620 shipwrecks in Portuguese waters, 120 of which were in the Madeira and Porto Santo area.
Around 250 ships carrying treasure have been wrecked in the waters of the Azores and Madeira archipelagos and on the Portuguese mainland coast, underwater archaeologist Alexandre Monteiro, who mapped the sunken ships in these regions, told Lusa.
According to the researcher at the History, Territories and Communities Institute at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, who has been diving and studying underwater findings for 25 years, the database he created identified 8,620 shipwrecks in this maritime territory.
“I have around 7,500 ships for the mainland coast, around 1,000 for the Azores and 120 ships for the coast of Madeira. They were lost there”, he said, explaining that these are ships from after 1500, when documentation began to exist.
This identification is the first step, a starting point to go after the ship.
And he said that when he was in the Azores, he found a reference, in a footnote, to the loss of a flagship in 1615 – Nossa Senhora da Luz, in Faial.
“I wanted to find that ship. It took me four years to research in various archives and, after those four years, I dived and on the first dive I did I found the wreck site,” he said.
“When treasure hunting companies started knocking on the door of the regional government of the Azores, our biggest drama was that we didn’t know how many ships there were or where they were. We knew, we suspected, but our knowledge was zero,” he said.
The situation is different today and it is precisely from this database that Alexandre Monteiro states that there are around 250 ships with treasures that were lost in the territorial waters of the Azores, Madeira and the Portuguese mainland coast and that remain there.
“I know that in front of Troia there is a Spanish ship from 1589, called Nossa Senhora do Rosário. I investigated and I even know the name of the commander’s mother and there are officially 22 tons of gold and silver there,” he revealed.
When asked whether the Portuguese Government was aware of this information, the researcher said that it had been published, but that no one had done anything about it.
Regarding the risk of these treasures being at the mercy of treasure hunters, Alexandre Monteiro said that “it is difficult, because it will all be under the sand”.
“If I spent a month working on the project, I would find the ship,” he assured.
And he lamented: “We know that there are 250 ships with treasures and we know that, sooner or later, a port project, something like this will be found. There is no contingency plan to protect a find like this.”