Courtesy: CNN 
 
 IT IS every archaeologist’s dream — the discovery of a missing ship which disappeared more than 500 years ago with a treasure chest of gold on-board. The discovery and what it uncovered continues to captivate with talks now in place for the site to be opened up into a museum featuring what remains of the shipwreck that had been buried under the sand for half a millennia. In 2008, miners were pushing their bulldozers across the golden sands, when they happened upon metal, wood, and pipes assembled in a strange, and at the time indiscernible, mass. However, it was a week into the excavation that a treasure chest laden with gold was found, with the coins indicating it had come from a Portuguese ship which had disappeared in 1533. “It adds new meaning to the concept of the ship having being loaded with gold,” Dr Noli said. “The superstructure started breaking up and the chest with the coins was in the captain’s cabin, and it broke free and fell to the bottom of the sea intact… In breaking up, a very heavy part of the side of the ship fell on that chest and bent some of the coins. The ship mysteriously disappeared in 1533 which would make this the oldest shipwreck to be discovered in Sub Saharan Africa. WHAT ELSE WAS FOUND 
 
 Thousands of Portuguese and Spanish gold coins, Portuguese silver coins, bronze cannons, tonnes of copper ingots, more than 50 elephant tusks, as well as navigational instruments were uncovered. As per 16th-century practice, timber, muskets, cannonballs and swords are being kept in damp storage. The area came to be known as the Sperrgebiet, or "forbidden territory," and was soon overrun by Germans on the hunt for the precious stone (they annexed 10,000 square miles of the desert for themselves). Diamond company DeBeers and the Namibian government still run a joint operation in the area, according to CNN and the area remains largely out of sight. The Sperrgebiet has for over a century been heavily restricted due to the mining operation underway, which has limited the number of humans who can access the 10,000-square-mile region.
– Miners have been pulling diamonds from a vast area of Namibia's Namib Desert called the Sperrgebiet (or "forbidden territory") for more than a century. But in 2008, workers hunting for diamonds where the desert meets the Atlantic Ocean found something even more precious: the likely remains of the Bom Jesus, a Portuguese sailing ship that disappeared some 500 years ago on its way to India. It's a discovery, per recent coverage by News.com.au, that solved "one of the biggest maritime mysteries." Also, says archaeologist Dieter Noli, it's the oldest shipwreck ever found in sub-Saharan Africa. And there's treasure as well: Included in the find were some 2,000 gold coins from Spain and Portugal, according to Gainesville News. Upon unearthing the site of the shipwreck, per CNN, workers found pieces of metal, wood, and what looked like pipes. Not sure what they had found, they called in Noli. "It just looked like a disturbed beach," he told CNN earlier this month, "but lying on it were bits and pieces." Among those were a centuries-old musket and an elephant tusk. "I thought, 'Oh, no no, this is definitely a shipwreck,'" Noli says. Ultimately, in addition to the gold, workers recovered cannons (the pipes), navigational instruments, tons of copper ingots, swords, and a lot more—some 5,438 artifacts. Not much of the actual structure of the ship remains. But archaeologists have matched the cargo with that of the Bom Jesus (which means the "Good Jesus") based on details found in a 16th-century book that lists the ship as lost. The stretch of coastline is known for storms. Speaking to CNN, Noli speculates that the Bom Jesus "came in, it hit a rock, and it leaned over." (A famed shipwreck closer to home is getting a closer look.)