Spain & the USA are battling over the ownership of coins found on a sunken Spanish Ship – although the original source of the coins was Peru.

From:
Independent

The battle for the ‘Mercedes’ millions
Could the WikiLeaks cables decide the fate of a $500m treasure discovered off the coast of Spain? Dale Fuchs reports
Tuesday, 8 February 2011

For 200 years, the silver coins settled silently into the Atlantic seabed, 3,000 feet beneath the waves. They gathered in clumps like rocks across a vast swath of ocean floor near southern Portugal, crusting over with sediment and weighing a total of 17 tonnes.

The coins were certainly of no use to the 250 sailors who carried them from Peru on what was probably the Spanish frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, which sank in 1804, torn apart by British cannon fire. But now, transported from their watery-yet-lucrative grave to litigious landlubbers, those 600,000 idle coins, reportedly worth up to $500 million, are working overtime.
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