The 1715 Treasure Fleet
Eleven or possibly twelve ships carrying the accumulated treasure of the Spanish Americas sailed from Havana on July 24, 1715, and a hurricane put them on the Florida coast seven days later. More than a thousand people died. Salvors still working the wrecks brought up more than 1,000 silver coins and 5 gold escudos in the summer of 2025, worth about a million dollars. Spanish salvagers recovered most of the treasure in 1715, and coins still come out of the sand after storms.
Search Area
loading map…
- Address
- McLarty Treasure Museum, 13180 North A1A, Vero Beach, FL 32963
- Anchor site
- McLarty Treasure Museum, 13180 North A1A
- Inside
- Sebastian Inlet State Park
- Built on
- The 1715 survivors' and salvagers' camp
- Beaches
- Public either side, open dawn to dusk
- Nearest town
- Vero Beach
The museum is the fixed point, and the wreck line runs offshore from the park in both directions.
The Legend
The crossing
Spain had not moved treasure across the Atlantic for two years because of war, and by 1715 the backlog was enormous: silver from Mexico and Peru, gold, emeralds from Colombia, Chinese porcelain and silk brought across the Pacific to Acapulco and hauled overland. Eleven or possibly twelve ships left Havana on July 24 under Juan Esteban de Ubilla and Antonio de Echeverz, late in the season and knowing it.
The hurricane caught them off the Florida coast on July 31. The ships were driven onto the reefs and beaches between what is now Melbourne and Fort Pierce. About 1,000 people died, and about 1,500 survivors came ashore onto an empty coast.
The camp
The survivors set up on the beach near the Sebastian Inlet, and Spain ran salvage from that camp for years, sending divers down to bring back what they could and shipping it out under guard. They recovered a good share of it. They did not recover all of it, and the camp site is now under and around the McLarty Treasure Museum, which is built on it.
Why it keeps coming back
The wrecks lie in shallow water close to shore, in sand that moves with every storm. That is why the coast is called the Treasure Coast, and why gold coins still turn up on the beach after a hurricane passes.
Modern salvage runs under state permits with archaeological reporting requirements, and Queens Jewels holds the rights to the 1715 wrecks. In the summer 2025 season, a crew under Captain Levin Shavers recovered more than 1,000 silver reales and 5 gold escudos, valued at about a million dollars. That was a normal season, not an exceptional one.
What is left
Spanish manifests are detailed, and comparing them against 300 years of recovery is how the estimates are made. The state's own marker at the camp puts it plainly: "the great majority of the treasure was safely regained and moved to Havana by the Spanish salvagers." What they missed is still turning up, a few coins at a time, within sight of the road.
What May Be Out There
The Spanish crown registered what it shipped, which is why the estimates here are unusually solid.
- Silver coins and bars from the mints at Mexico City, Lima, and Potosí, the bulk of the cargo by weight.
- Gold in coin and bar, including escudos struck at Mexico City and Cuzco.
- Colombian emeralds, pearls, and worked jewelry, some of it personal property rather than registered cargo.
- Chinese porcelain and silk carried across the Pacific and hauled overland from Acapulco.
- Recovered in the 2025 season alone: 1,051 silver reales and 5 gold escudos.
Unregistered cargo, smuggled to avoid the crown's tax, is not in the manifests at all, and by every contemporary account there was a great deal of it.
The Evidence
Documented record
- Spanish manifests and salvage accounts from the fleet and the years of official recovery that followed.
- The survivors' and salvagers' camp on the beach, excavated and interpreted, with the museum built on it.
- Continuous recoveries under state permit, reported and cataloged, from the 1960s to the present season.
Legend and hearsay
- Beach stories about particular coins and particular storms, which are impossible to check and mostly harmless.
- Claims about specific untouched wrecks in specific spots, which circulate every few years.
Known Clues
The coast itself. The wrecks are strung along roughly 50 miles between Melbourne and Fort Pierce, in shallow water very close to shore. This is not a search for a location. The locations are known and several are named after the ships that made them.
Storm cycles. Sand moves. A hurricane that strips a beach exposes what the last one buried, which is why finds cluster in the weeks after big weather and why the same stretch can be barren for years and then productive in a morning.
The manifest gap. Comparing what Spain registered against what Spain and everyone since has recovered is how the professionals decide where to work. The gap is large, and it is the reason the salvage companies keep paying for another season.
Visiting Information
The McLarty Treasure Museum inside Sebastian Inlet State Park, built on the survivors' camp, has been temporarily closed since July 28, 2026, so it is worth checking the park's page before driving out. Mel Fisher's Treasure Museum in Sebastian shows 1715 Fleet finds and is open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 5pm and Sunday from noon to 5pm.
The beaches either side are public, and people work them with detectors after storms. Inside the state park, detecting is allowed only in designated areas and only for modern objects, and anything historic found on state land belongs to the state. The wreck sites themselves are state-owned and worked only under permit, so diving on them is not a thing a visitor can do.
Winter storms and the weeks after a hurricane are when finds are made, which is also when the surf is worst. The park has camping, a good inlet for fishing, and Vero Beach is a short drive south.
Reality Check
This is the rare case where the treasure is not in question. Spain wrote down what it loaded, a hurricane put it on a known stretch of coast on July 31, 1715, and material from it has been coming out of the water continuously for sixty years, including about a million dollars' worth in the summer of 2025. What is uncertain is only how much remains and exactly where, and the people best placed to know are the ones still paying crews to look.
Field Gallery
No approved field photos yet. You could be first.
Community Notes
No community notes yet.
Strange Places Worth the Detour
Bermuda Triangle
144 miLloyd's of London and the U.S. Coast Guard have each gone through the loss records and found no disappearance rate above what other busy, storm-prone shipping lanes produce. No government or geographic body has ever defined the triangle's boundaries, which move depending on who is drawing the map.
Skunk Ape Research HQ
144 miA real, still-operating roadside research station deep in the Everglades is dedicated to tracking Florida's own Bigfoot. It's run by a man who says he's seen the creature four times since childhood.
Coral Castle
161 miEdward Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant, began carving oolite limestone in 1923, then spent years moving the whole project, with stones of over 21 tons, to land he bought in Homestead in 1936. He credited only the secrets of the pyramids and the laws of weight and leverage, and photographs that surfaced later show tripods, winches, and pulleys at the site.
The Atocha Sterncastle
242 miMel Fisher searched for 16 years and found the main pile of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha in July 1985, more than 450 million dollars of it. The ship's 1622 manifest says that is not all of it. Still unaccounted for are 111 gold bars, 433 silver bars, 125,000 silver coins, 14 bronze cannon, and the 35 boxes of gems that were stored in the sterncastle, which has never been found.