Thieves stole jewelry and artifacts from one of the most important prehistoric gold collections at a museum in Spain’s Alicante province, writes UNN, citing the BBC.
Details
The Villena Treasure is a unique hoard containing nearly ten kilograms of gold, bowls, bottles and bracelets dating back to the Bronze Age.
Police are still assessing the exact number of items stolen during the raid, which took place early Friday morning. The museum confirmed to the BBC that the items taken included rings, bowls and bracelets.
This is the latest high-profile robbery of a European museum. Last year, thieves carried out a brazen daylight robbery at the Louvre in Paris.
The operation at the Villena museum was "extremely fast and extremely professional," a spokesperson for the Villena city council said.
The city council said the robbery began with a diversion. According to Spanish media reports, at around 05:15 local time, an alarm went off at a local sports center, causing police to go there first.
Then, at around 05:20, the museum alarm went off. The thieves needed only four minutes to make their way through the museum and leave the building before police arrived.
Villena Mayor Fulgencio Cerdán said the thieves "stole a significant part of the treasure," including all the gold, El País reports.
The museum’s collection, which dates to around 1000 BC, consists mainly of gold items, but also includes objects made of silver, iron and amber.
It consists of more than 60 Bronze Age items, including 29 bracelets, 11 bowls, three bottles and various other objects.
The city is "devastated," Cerdán said. "They took most of the treasure," he added.
"I am even trembling. The truth is that for those of us from Villena, this is destroying us. It is part of our heritage, our wealth," the mayor said.
The collection was discovered in 1963 by archaeologist José María Soler in a vessel that had sunk in a dried-up riverbed in Villena.
The Villena city council spokesperson insisted that there had been "no failure" on the museum’s part.
"All security systems were activated," he noted.
Additional information
Last year saw a series of attacks on European museums. In October 2025, thieves broke into the Louvre museum in Paris in broad daylight, stealing jewelry worth $102 million before fleeing on scooters. The robbery lasted about eight minutes.
The Apollo Gallery in the Louvre has reopened for the first time after the robbery23.07.26, 14:00
Last week, four works of "extraordinary value" by Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina were stolen from a museum in Sicily, Italy’s Ministry of Culture reported.
Earlier this month, Italian police said they had found paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth more than $10.4 million that had been stolen from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation museum near Parma.