Archaeologists working near the Strait of Magellan in southern Chile have unearthed a silver coin that was ceremonially placed more than 440 years ago during the founding of a doomed Spanish colony.
The coin — an "8-real" piece, the original pirate "piece of eight" — was discovered in March during excavations at the site of Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe, a settlement established in 1584. It was found atop a stone within the underground foundations of what appears to have been the colony's first church, as reported by Live Science.
The discovery is remarkable because it directly corresponds to a surviving written account by the Spanish navigator Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, who described placing the coin on the stone as part of a Christian founding ceremony — a standard practice when Spain established colonies in the New World. "This discovery provides a rare and powerful point of convergence between written sources and archaeological evidence," said lead researcher Soledad González Díaz, a historian at Bernardo O'Higgins University in Santiago.
Spain founded the colony in response to reports that the English privateer Francis Drake had used the strait to pass between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in 1578. The strait, first navigated by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, was for years the only known route to the Pacific, and Spain hoped to fortify it against enemies. But the settlement met a grim fate; cut off from resupply, most of its colonists perished.
The same research team had previously used Sarmiento de Gamboa's writings to locate two bronze cannons at the site in 2019. The coin's discovery further validates his accounts and an old map of the settlement's layout, opening new possibilities for reconstructing how the colony was organized in its brief and tragic existence.
