The small island rumored to hold a huge billion treasure is called Cocos, about 550km off the coast of Costa Rica. This island is today the National Park of Costa Rica and is a special tourist attraction.
Visitors to Cocos Island can enjoy unspoiled natural scenery and diverse marine life. Many people come here because they heard rumors from hundreds of years ago about huge treasures worth up to 1 billion USD.
Cocos Island today belongs to Costa Rica.
The most famous treasure said to still be on Cocos Island is the Lima Treasure . This is a collection that includes a lot of gold, silver and church items, such as the life-sized jade-encrusted gold statue of the Virgin Mary brought from Lima, Peru.
According to history books, when the revolution broke out in Peru in the early 19th century, the head of Lima wanted to protect his valuable property, so he loaded all his possessions on the ship of an English captain named William Thompson.
According to the plan, Thompson carried the treasure around at sea for several months until the situation stabilized.
But carrying treasures worth hundreds of millions of dollars for a while made Thompson greedy. The British captain and his subordinates killed the sailors sent by the city of Lima, Peru. The ship departs to Cocos Island to bury the treasure.
Not long after leaving Cocos, Thompson’s Mary Dear was captured by a Spanish navy ship. The ship’s crew was later executed for piracy, except for Thompson and an accomplice who agreed to return to Cocos Island to show where the gold was hidden.
But as soon as they arrived on the island, the two fled and were never found. Hundreds of Spanish explorers flocked to the island in search of treasure but to no avail.
The island is said to contain a series of huge treasures.
Before the treasure of Lima, the story of pirates choosing the island as a place to hide their wealth was spread widely. In 1818, a British naval officer named Bennett Grahame on patrol in the South Pacific decided to desert and become a pirate.
During his time as a pirate, Grahame is said to have stolen a huge amount of gold up to 350 tons from Spanish merchant ships. Once, Grahame was captured alive and executed along with some of his crew.
Twenty years later, a woman named Mary Welsh, who served on Grahame’s pirate ship, said she witnessed Grahame and his crew bury their possessions on Cocos Island.
To prove his claim, Welsh presented a map believed to have been drawn by Grahame, showing the location of the treasure.
Welsh led the British fleet to the island to find treasure, but it seems that after 20 years, the landscape has changed a lot, so the treasure hunt failed.
Another equally famous treasure, said to still be somewhere on the island, is that of Benito Bonito. This is the pirate that once instilled fear in all the ships passing on the west coast of the Americas.
In the period of 1818, Bonito raged everywhere, plundering, burning Spanish merchant ships and then bringing the looted property back to be buried on Cocos Island.
Cocos Island today is a popular tourist destination.
Bonito’s mistake was to reveal treasure worth about 300 million dollars to two British sailors. A few years later, these two were arrested and imprisoned. In exchange for their freedom, they revealed where Bonito was hiding, leading to the pirate boss’s death.
500 expeditions by Spanish ships then landed on Cocos Island, but no one found the treasure. The fact that so many boats flocked to the island caused the Spanish authorities at that time to issue a ban.
In 2012, Canadian and British media reported on a British expedition carrying modern radar and camera equipment setting foot on the island to find treasure.
Shaun Whitehead, who led the search team, said: “We’ve landed on the island. But can only stay here for 6 months. That is too little time. The Costa Rican government did not allow us to return to the island because our appearance has fueled public opinion about the treasure.
According to Forbes, there are rumors that at least one of the three treasures has been found, but people keep claiming nothing to turn the way, as well as raise hope for other search crews. It is estimated that the total value of the treasures on the island is up to 1 billion USD.
Currently, treasure hunting is banned in Cocos, but some scientists are said to be secretly searching for treasure under the guise of “scientific research”.