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Lost Treasure

Buried caches, lost mines, and vanished hoards that people are still searching for, weighed against the evidence for and against them.

Results · 12 mysteries

of 189

Epirus, Greece
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Ali Pasha's Treasure
Ali Pasha ruled Epirus from Ioannina for four decades and was killed in January 1822 in a monastery on the island in Lake Pamvotida, where he had taken refuge from the Sultan's troops. The fortune he was said to have hidden before his fall has been searched for ever since. An Italian company dug the area for five years from 1913 and found nothing.
Normandy, France
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Château de Gisors
In March 1946 the castle's gardener walked into the town hall at Gisors and reported what he said he had found after years of digging under the castle mound at night: a stone chapel underground, sarcophagi along its walls, and 30 metal chests stacked in the nave in columns of 10. His tunnel was filled in. France's culture minister sent official excavators in the 1960s and they found nothing at all.
County Tipperary, Ireland
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Derrynaflan
Two men with a metal detector lifted five liturgical vessels out of this bog island on February 17, 1980, and said nothing for three weeks. The case that followed reached the Supreme Court and established that the medieval law of treasure trove had never validly passed to the Irish state.
Cundinamarca, Colombia
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Laguna de Guatavita
El Dorado was a man, not a city. The Muisca covered a new ruler in gold dust and floated him out onto this lake to throw offerings into it. Around 1580 a merchant cut a notch into the crater rim to drain it, and the notch is still there.
Styria, Austria
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Lake Toplitz
In the summer of 1959 divers working for the German magazine Stern pulled 15 crates out of a mountain lake in Styria. Fourteen of them held counterfeit British banknotes, printed by the SS under Operation Bernhard to wreck confidence in the pound. Farmers had watched uniformed men carry crates down to the shore in 1945, and the question of what else went into the water has never closed.
Nova Scotia, Canada
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Oak Island Treasure
A small Nova Scotia island where a buried, booby-trapped shaft discovered in 1795 has driven more than two centuries of treasure-hunting, six known deaths, and theories ranging from pirate gold to Templar relics, without ever producing a confirmed treasure.
Texas, United States
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Presidio de San Saba
Treasure hunters have worked the country around this Spanish fort for two centuries looking for the Lost Bowie Mine. The reason they come is that sometime after 1895 a prankster carved the word "mine" into the gatepost, underneath Jim Bowie's name.
Dhofar Governorate, Oman
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Shisr, the Ubar Site
On February 5, 1992, a filmmaker and a NASA scientist announced they had found the Atlantis of the Sands using satellite radar. The archaeologist who ran the dig spent the next few years explaining that they had not. The fort and the sinkhole that swallowed it are still there.
Virginia, United States
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The Beale Treasure
In 1885 an anonymous pamphlet printed in Lynchburg claimed that a man named Thomas J. Beale had buried gold, silver, and jewels in Bedford County around 1820, and left the directions in three numbered ciphers. Only one cipher has been read, using the Declaration of Independence as its key, and it lists the contents but not the spot. The other two have held for 140 years, and the diggings around Montvale have turned up nothing.

Results · 12 mysteries

Ali Pasha's Treasure

Château de Gisors

Derrynaflan

Laguna de Guatavita

Lake Toplitz

Oak Island Treasure

Presidio de San Saba

Shisr, the Ubar Site

The Beale Treasure