The Buried Treasure of the Coast
Near Cannon Beach, Oregon
Just south of here, where Neahkahnie Mountain drops toward the sea, lies one of Oregon's most persistent legends: a lost Spanish treasure that no one has ever found. For generations, the story has been told of sailors long ago carrying a chest up the slope, burying it, and, in the darkest versions, killing a man and burying him atop it so his spirit would guard the gold. Treasure hunters took the tale so seriously that they dug the hillside so full of holes it earned the nickname the mountain of a thousand holes.
And here is what makes the legend hard to dismiss entirely. Something really did wreck on this coast. For well over a century, locals have found chunks of beeswax washed up on the beaches, some stamped with old Spanish shipping marks.
Researchers studied the wax and the ship's timbers and believe the wreck was probably the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon that sailed from Manila in sixteen ninety three, laden with Chinese goods and cargo wax, and never reached its destination. New pieces of that beeswax still wash ashore between Manzanita and Cannon Beach after big winter storms. The gold has never turned up.
The wreck was real.
