San Jose: New images released of 'holy grail of shipwrecks' off coast of Colombia

CTV National News: Treasure found in shipwreck There’s a growing dispute over a treasure worth billions found in a centuries-old shipwreck. Bill Fortier has the details.

New images are offering a fresh look at a centuries-old shipwreck off the coast of Colombia, a discovery holding not only incredible historic wealth but also a treasure potentially worth billions of dollars by today's standards.

Video shared by the Colombian government earlier this month show in detail the wreckage of the 300-year-old San Jose, a Spanish galleon that sank near the city of Cartagena in the early 18th century.

Colombia President Ivan Duque said new equipment allowed them to dive deeper and get better quality images.

Spread out over the sea floor are gold coins and colonial era cannons.

In the process of obtaining the latest images, the Colombian government announced it had found two more shipwrecks, as well.

"Our government decided that all this treasure is a unified heritage, that it cannot be divided, that it cannot be separated, that it is a whole, of enormous patrimonial wealth," Duque said in a translated statement.

Discovered in 2015, the 62-gun, three-masted Spanish galleon, nicknamed the "holy grail of shipwrecks," sank on June 8, 1708, during a battle with British ships in the War of Spanish Succession.

Along with 600 people on board, the ship also carried a treasure of gold, silver and emeralds.

The shipwreck has been the subject of a legal battle over who owns the rights to the treasure.

The United Nations' cultural agency, UNESCO, also has warned against "commercial exploitation" of the cultural heritage.

"But it's potentially also a very exciting wreck from a historical point of view, as well, because it comes from a period of European colonialism in the America, about which there's a lot of outstanding questions that a wreck like this could help us answer," Roger Marsters, marine history curator at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, N.S., told CTV National News.

Even though it is underwater, Marsters said sediment buildup can prevent oxygen from getting at the organic material, helping to create a sort of "time capsule."

"So it really is a remarkable environment that can preserve elements of the human past, in a way that perhaps no other environment can," he said.

Not only are the lives of the people on board preserved in some way, so too are those who helped produce the wealth they were carrying, which at the time would have been slaves.

"We're really talking about the period in which the modern world came to be," Marsters said.

"And so these are really rare opportunities to glimpse the world that we live in coming together and coming into being, for better and for worse."

With files from The Associated Press