The video released by the Colombian government earlier this month shows in detail the wreckage of 300-year-old San Jose, a Spanish galley that sank near the city of Carthage in the early 18th century. Colombian President Ivan Duque said the new equipment allowed them to dive deeper and take better quality images. Spread on the seabed are gold coins and cannons of the colonial era. In the process of taking the latest pictures, the Colombian government announced that it had found two more wrecks, as well. “Our government has decided that all this treasure is a unified legacy, that it cannot be divided, that it cannot be separated, that it is a whole, a huge ancestral wealth,” Duke said in a translated statement. Discovered in 2015, the Spanish galley with 62 weapons, with three masts, nicknamed the “holy grail of shipwrecks”, sank on June 8, 1708, during a battle with British ships in the War of the Spanish Succession. Along with 600 people on board, the ship also carried a treasure trove of gold, silver and emeralds. The wreck was the subject of a legal dispute over who holds the rights to the treasure. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has also warned against the “commercial exploitation” of cultural heritage. “But it is potentially a very fascinating shipwreck from a historical point of view, because it comes from a period of European colonialism in America, about which there are many outstanding questions that a shipwreck like this could help answer. “Roger Myrsters, curator of marine history at the Nautical Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, NS, told CTV National News. Although it is underwater, Marsters said that the accumulation of sediment can prevent oxygen from entering the organic material, helping to create a kind 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 the ship preserved in some way, but also those who helped to produce the wealth they carried, who at that time would be slaves. “We are really talking about the period in which the modern world was created,” Marsters said. “And so these are really rare opportunities to see the world we live in, as we concentrate and create, for better or for worse.” With files from the Associated Press