THIEVES RAIDED A museum in Spain early this morning and stole one of the world’s greatest collections of Bronze Age gold.  

In a matter of minutes they had made off with more than 50 mainly gold objects from the Treasure of Villena collection at the Villena Museum in Alicante.

“The alarm at the Villena Museum went off around 5.20am (4.20am Irish time),” said a spokesman for the town council, adding that by 5.24am the thieves had already left the building.

The operation was “super-fast and super-professional”, the spokesman said.

“They’ve taken most of the treasure,” the mayor of Villena, Fulgencio Cerdan, told journalists, his voice breaking.

“We are absolutely devastated, I’m even trembling. The truth is that for those of us from Villena, this destroys us. It’s part of our heritage, of our wealth,” Cerdan said.

The 29 bracelets, 11 bowls, three bottles, and other miscellaneous pieces in the Treasure of Villena are kept in a small museum in the town, which has a population of just over 34,000.

Though mainly gold, there are also pieces of silver, iron and amber, all dating back to about 1,000 BC. The treasure was discovered in 1963 by archaeologist Jose Maria Soler in a vessel sunk in a dried out riverbed in Villena.

While the treasure’s historical value is incalculable, the gold alone is worth around €1.7 million, according to the mayor.

 ’Through a window’ 

The thieves arrived in several vehicles and apparently entered the museum “through a window”, according to the Spanish government’s deputy representative in Alicante, Manuel Pineda.

“All security systems were activated,” according to the Villena spokesman, who insisted there had been “no failure” by the museum.

Shortly before the robbery, another alarm went off at the city’s sports centre and authorities were investigating whether that was a diversion created by the thieves, the spokesperson added.

Today’s heist comes just days after Europol published a report about robberies of high-value cultural items becoming more common and more violent. 

Last October, thieves broke into the Louvre Museum in Paris in broad daylight, escaping in less than eight minutes with jewellery worth more than €87 million. There have since been a series of brazen raids in institutions across Europe.

Four works “of extraordinary value” by Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina were stolen from a museum in Sicily, Italy’s culture ministry said on Sunday.

Two days earlier, Italian police said they had recovered paintings by Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse worth over €8.9 million which were stolen from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation museum near Parma.

With reporting from AFP