Thieves Loot Spain's Bronze Age Gold in Minutes

The Treasure of Villena is made up of more than 60 objects — 29 bracelets, 11 bowls, three bottles and other pieces — dating to about 1000 B.C. Most are gold, roughly ten kilos of it, but the trove also includes silver, iron and amber. A recent study in the journal Trabajos de Prehistoria concluded some of the iron pieces were probably forged from rare meteoritic iron.

It is the latest in a run of raids on European museums. In October 2025, thieves broke into the Louvre in Paris in broad daylight and escaped in under eight minutes with jewellery the Guardian valued at 88 million euros and the BBC at $102 million. Four works by Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina were stolen from a museum in Sicily last week, Italy's culture ministry said. Days earlier, Italian police recovered paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth more than $10.4 million taken from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation museum near Parma.

In a report published this week, EU police agency Europol said member states have detected a shift "towards violent and forceful methods" in cultural-property crime, possibly pointing to new criminal networks built around specific artifacts — crews "recruited locally through social media and instant communication channels, without prior connections to each other."