Thieves ransacked Spain’s Villena Museum, taking with them one of Europe’s most significant Bronze Age gold collections in a record four-minute heist on Thursday morning, the Guardian reported.
The thieves stole items from the Treasure of Villena, one of the city’s treasured prehistoric artifacts that includes some 66 Bronze Age objects, among them, 29 bracelets, 11 bowls, three bottles, and other miscellaneous pieces dating to 1000 BCE. It’s unclear how many pieces were stolen, but according to local media reports, the thieves left behind a few items including three silver vessels, a bracelet, and some of the ornamentation of the bastón del reyezuelo (or the “Kingfisher staff”), a prehistoric ceremonial scepter.
The mayor of Villena Fulgencio Cerdán said that the thieves took “most of the treasure” and that the city is “absolutely devastated, I’m even trembling. The truth is that for those of us from Villena, this destroys us. It’s part of our heritage, of our wealth.” The gold pieces that were stolen are estimated to be worth €1.7 million ($1.98 million).
A spokesperson for the Villena council said that the alarm at the museum went off around 5:20 a.m. and that the thieves had escaped the building by 5:24 a.m., describing the incident as “super-fast and super-professional.” The Spanish government’s deputy representative in Alicante, Manuel Pineda said that the thieves had arrived in several vehicles and broke into the museum through a window, but the Villena spokesperson argued that “all security systems were activated” and that the museum had “no failure” in the situation.
The robbery was meticulously planned by the thieves; prior to the alarms going off at the museum, an alarm had gone off at the city’s sports center that authorities are calling suspicious. “They had it very well planned. They knew how to do it, how to act and how to escape,” Mauro Hernández, an expert on the treasure and a professor of archaeology at the University of Alicante told the broadcaster Cadena SER.
The theft follows a report, published earlier this week by Europol, about how European museums are on high alert as the target of numerous robberies, with precious metals and jewelry of particular interest for thieves because of their value on the market and the ease with which they can be melted down.
