Bou Ferrer Wreck
About
This 30-meter merchantman sank a kilometer off Villajoyosa on Spain's Costa Blanca in the first century CE, carrying roughly 2,500 amphorae of Baetican garum alongside lead ingots destined for rebuilding Rome after Nero's fire. Divers Jose Bou and Antonio Ferrer found the wreck in 1999 lying 25 meters down, and it remains the largest Roman wreck under excavation anywhere in the Mediterranean. It is also the only ancient shipwreck in Spain open to recreational divers.
What happened here
A merchantman goes down with everything aboard and the sea keeps most of it. Cargo is usually amphorae — wine, oil, fish sauce — stacked in layers in sand, or roof tiles, or marble in the round, or ingots stamped with the smelter's name. Timbers survive where the mud or the cargo covers them, and the hull shows how it was built: planks edge-joined with mortise and tenon before the frames go in, a way of building that is slow, strong and about to be abandoned. Personal things come up too — a cooking pot, a lamp, coins that date the last voyage to within a few years. Most losses happen in autumn, close inshore, on a coast the crew knew.
Sources
Nearby
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