Divers working the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, the Spanish treasure galleon that sank off the Florida Keys in a hurricane in 1622, surfaced this month with a 55-pound copper ingot that could be worth as much as $25,000. The find, announced by Mel Fisher’s Shipwreck Expeditions, is the latest recovery from a debris field that has been giving up gold, silver and copper for four decades and, by the salvage company’s own accounting, still holds far more than divers have brought up so far.
The ingot is one of 140 listed on the Atocha’s original manifest, meaning a ship that went down carrying the wealth of an entire Spanish treasure fleet is still, more than four centuries later, surrendering its cargo one piece at a time to crews working roughly 35 miles west of Key West.
A hurricane that sank a 28-ship fleet in 1622
The Atocha was part of a 28-ship Spanish fleet carrying silver, gold and other valuables from mines in Bolivia and Colombia back to Spain when a hurricane sank it in just 55 feet of water off the Florida Keys on September 5, 1622, according to reporting from SlashGear on the wreck’s history. The ship was carrying an estimated 35 tons of silver and 161 pieces of gold, along with an undisclosed amount of smuggled treasure, when the storm killed 255 of its 260 crew members and scattered the cargo across a wide stretch of seafloor.
Legendary treasure hunter Mel Fisher spent 16 years searching for the wreck before his team finally located it on July 20, 1985, a discovery valued at the time at more than $400 million. A Florida court ordered Fisher and his investors to turn over 25% of the recovered treasure to the state, but decades later the same debris field is still producing finds, because the hurricane spread the Atocha’s cargo across an area too large for any single expedition to fully clear.
A 55-pound ingot found by a faint metal-detector signal
According to Breitbart’s report on the latest recovery, Captain Drake Nicholas and his crew aboard the salvage vessel DARE picked up a faint metal-detector signal while following what Mel Fisher’s Shipwreck Expeditions called a “tight trail of coins” across the seabed. “I thought it was a cannon, but it ended up being a copper ingot, which was also very exciting,” Nicholas said of the discovery.
Copper, unlike gold or silver, was not simply currency. Molten copper was poured into sand molds four centuries ago to produce ingots like this one, and the Atocha’s copper was headed to Spain to be cast into bronze cannons, which were stronger and could fire farther than many of the era’s iron guns. “I believe that only certain people could actually own copper because it was making such strong cannons,” Nicholas said. “It wasn’t something an everyday guy could have a stockpile of. It was more for the king and queen to make cannons.” Mel Fisher’s Shipwreck Expeditions said it believes the ingot is worth between $18,000 and $25,000, and that the crew appears to be “hot on the trail” of further finds at the same spot.
The first Atocha silver bar since 1999
The copper ingot follows an even rarer find earlier this year. In June 2026, the same salvage operation recovered a 22.5-pound silver bar from the wreck, the first silver bar pulled from the Atocha site since 1999, according to a press release from Mel Fisher’s Treasures cited by SlashGear. That bar, heavily encrusted after nearly four centuries underwater, was estimated to be worth around $100,000, and its recovery came from the same routine dives by Captain Drake’s crew that later turned up the copper ingot. Between the two finds, this year’s dive season has also produced additional silver coins and musket balls from the same debris field, according to Breitbart.
According to Mel Fisher’s Treasures, more than $120 million worth of silver, bronze guns and copper ingots is still believed to be unrecovered at the site, a figure that frames both this year’s finds less as an ending than as two data points in a search that has now run for four decades since the main wreck was first located.
A debris field too large to ever fully clear
Ocean currents, shifting sands and the sheer size of the field spread by the 1622 hurricane mean that even a wreck as heavily explored as the Atocha keeps producing major discoveries almost every year. The 27-year gap between silver bar recoveries is itself evidence of how unevenly the site gives up its cargo: some years produce nothing notable, and then a single dive turns up a bar or ingot that had sat undisturbed since the ship went down.
The Atocha is far from the only wreck rewriting what divers know about ships lost centuries ago. Divers recently found a 2,400-year-old shipwreck carrying as many as 650 amphorae off the coast of an island in Greece’s Cyclades, according to a separate Breitbart report, a find Greece’s Ministry of Culture said “enriches our knowledge of trade and navigation during the Late Classical period.” Four centuries or twenty-four, the pattern is the same: storms scatter cargo across seafloors that modern divers are still slowly learning to read.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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