Roban el Tesoro de Villena, uno de los más valiosos de la Edad de Bronce en Europa

The Roban el Tesoro de Villena, one of the most valuable collections of the Bronze Age in Europe, has been stolen in the early hours of Thursday, prompting the Guardia Civil and Judicial Police to launch an investigation. The alarm was raised at 5:16 AM, according to municipal sources. The exact consequences of the theft remain unknown at the moment.

The Roban el Tesoro de Villena consists of a set of jewelry dating back to around 1000 BC, primarily made of gold. It includes 11 cups, 28 bracelets, and three bottles, as well as three silver bottles, two mixed pieces of bronze and gold, and one piece made of iron and gold, along with a final bracelet made of iron. The Museo Arqueológico Municipal (MUVI) in Villena considers this a the most important collection of Bronze Age tableware alongside the treasures of the royal tombs of Mycenae in Greece.

Archaeologist José María Soler and his collaborators discovered the treasure on December 1963 in a vessel hidden in the bed of a street in the Villena municipality, a town of approximately 35,000 inhabitants located in the Alt Vinalopó region, in the northern part of Alicante province. In October 1963, the first piece - a bracelet that could not be identified at the time as a jewel - was discovered among the earth that had been excavated from the Rambla del Panadero in the Villena hills of Morrón.

The piece was found while work was being carried out in the Ferriz street and initially thought to be a camion wheel part. The foreman of the work, Angel Tomás, left it exposed awaiting someone to come and claim it, mistakenly believing it to be a camion wheel part. However, fortune intervened and it ended up in the hands of local jeweler Carlos Miguel Esquembre, who consulted the expert opinion of the director of the Municipal Archaeological Museum, José María Soler.

This led to the commencement of excavations in the Rambla, which, after several days, culminated on December 1 with the discovery of the most important Bronze Age archaeological find in all of Europe: a set of 59 pieces of gold, silver, iron and bronze weighing almost 10 kilograms.