A rare archaeological collection from the Bronze Age was stolen in the early hours of Thursday from the museum in Villena, in Spain’s Alicante province.
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The target of the robbery was the Treasure of Villena (Tesoro de Villena), an approximately 3,000-year-old trove consisting mainly of precious objects made of gold, silver, iron and amber.
The museum alarm was triggered at 5:16 a.m., while it has not yet been determined whether the perpetrators took the entire collection or only part of it. The exact scale of the theft also remains to be verified.
Following the incident, the Guardia Civil and the Judicial Police arrived at the museum. According to municipal sources cited by the Spanish news agency EFE, investigators are working to clarify how the robbery was carried out and identify the missing objects.
Dating to around 1000 BCE, the Treasure of Villena is considered one of the most important metallurgical collections from the Bronze Age in Europe.
The collection comprises 59 objects, with a total weight of nearly 10 kilograms. It includes 11 cups, 28 bracelets and three vases, as well as items crafted from silver, amber, iron and gold.
The importance of the treasure goes beyond the value of the precious materials it contains, as it carries extraordinary historical and archaeological significance. For this reason, the collection is considered priceless to Europe’s cultural heritage.
Its discovery, in 1963, is linked to an event that seems to have been taken from a film.
In October of that year, workers found a bracelet in soil brought from Rambla del Panadero, in Sierra del Morón de Villena. At first, they thought the object was part of a truck engine.
Ángel Tomás, the project supervisor, placed the bracelet somewhere it could be seen, thinking its owner would return to retrieve it. He, too, believed it was a truck bearing.
The find later ended up with local silversmith Carlos Miguel Escobre, who suspected that the object might be of far greater importance. He notified José María Soler, who at the time headed the Municipal Archaeological Museum.
After examining the bracelet, archaeological searches began at Rambla del Panadero. On December 1, 1963, after several days of excavations, Soler and his colleagues discovered the treasure inside a vase hidden in the streambed.
The discovery became one of the most important Bronze Age finds in Europe. More than six decades later, the treasure is once again at the center of attention, this time because of a police investigation aimed at shedding light on the robbery and determining which objects were taken from the museum.
