Treasure of Lima
Region — where it (roughly) is
Land & claims · BLM · live
The story
In 1820, the city of Lima was under siege. Peru's war of independence was closing in, and the colonial elite faced a terrible choice: leave their wealth to the advancing forces, or trust it to a stranger and send it out to sea. They chose the sea — and in doing so, set in motion one of the most chased treasure legends in the world.
The riches were staggering: the city's gold and silver, and gem-encrusted religious artifacts stripped from its churches. All of it was entrusted to a British trader, Captain William Thompson, aboard his ship the Mary Dear. He was to guard the hoard offshore until it was safe to return it. It was, on paper, an act of desperate faith.
Thompson betrayed it. He mutinied, the story goes, seizing the treasure for himself — and then allegedly buried it on Cocos Island, the remote speck of land far out in the Pacific off the coast of Costa Rica. There the gold of Lima is said to lie still, somewhere beneath the island's dense forest and broken ground.
What happened next is the part that is not in doubt: the searching. Over 300 expeditions have gone to Cocos Island hunting the Treasure of Lima, and every one of them has come back empty-handed. Three centuries of maps, theories, and dug pits, and not one verified find. The island has become a kind of monument to the chase itself — beautiful, remote, and unyielding.
The wealth that left Lima was real. Where it went after the Mary Dear sailed is where fact gives way to legend, and where the digging has never stopped.
Fact vs. legend: Lima's wealth being sent to sea aboard the Mary Dear under Captain Thompson amid the 1820 siege, and the more than 300 failed expeditions to Cocos Island, are the documented contours; Thompson's mutiny and the burial of the hoard on the island are the allegation the searches have never confirmed.
Search area: The point marks Cocos Island, off Costa Rica (Pacific) — the search area or landmark, not the treasure, whose exact location is unknown.