Amaro Pargo’s Treasure Chest

 

The Claim
A Spanish pirate hide a box containing great wealth in a cabin “somewhere”

 

Amaro Pargo was a Spanish Corsair that lived during the late 17th and first half of the 18th century. A corsair is the Spanish name for a privateer, which is basically a legal pirate that’s only allowed to attack ships of the enemies of the country they belong to.

 

Amaro Pargo was especially good at being a pirate and managed to hold power over the route between south west Spain and the Caribbean, frequently attacking ships from England and Holland. He became a sort of Spanish Robin hood as he was known to give his earnings to the poor and also made frequent religious donations, which quickly made him famous across the country.

 

His wealth was considerable by the time he died, as he not only led a long and very successful piracy campaign against Spain’s enemies, but also worked as a trader shipping exotic goods from distant ports to be sold across Europe.

 

When he died on 14 October 1747, his funeral procession was stopped 9 times along its route by the huge amount the general public who turned up to witness it. Afterwards his heirs inherited vast amounts of land and money, but for some reason he left a special box hidden in one of his cabins.

 

In his will he wrote about a chest with a carved wood pattern on the lid he kept in his cabin. In the chest was gold jewelry, silver, pearls, Chinese porcelain, paintings, fabrics and precious stones of considerable value.

 

He went on to explain that the chests contents were itemised in a book wrapped in parchment and marked with the letter “D”, however he didn’t tell anyone where the book actually was.

 

In his will he does specifically used the word cabin, which can rule out the “house of Amaro Pargo” which has been searched top to bottom many times over the years by hopeful treasure hunters. Another location that can be ruled out is a cave he used to stash goods from time to time, which is the cave of San Mateo in Punta del Hidalgo northeast of Tenerife, but again this place has been searched and no wooden chest found.

 

Considering he was comfortable enough to hide something of such wealth there, and he used the word “cabin” it would most likely refer to a hunting cabin or small summer cabin, something that people of wealth would normally own in the 18th century.

 

Unfortunately the chances of the book surviving this long would be zero, and the cabin would have long fell into ruin and rotted into nothing, but perhaps the chest is still buried under where the floor used to be. By now the chest and some of the contents would have decomposed into nothing, such as the fabrics and paintings, but the remaining silver and gold jewelry once owned by the famous Amaro Pargo would be worth millions.