- After years of searching, the United States has returned to Spain a rare copy of a 1493 letter from Christopher Columbus, which had been stolen from a national archive in Barcelona. The letter, addressed to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain and describing the explorer's discoveries in the New World, was one of 16 copies made at the time of the original missive on Columbus's orders.
Stolen from the National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona in 2004 or 2005, the document was handed over late Wednesday to the Spanish ambassador to Washington, US officials said.
The thieves who took the letter had replaced it with a forgery, and the switch was only discovered by experts in 2012 after a tip from an informant that several other copies had been stolen from archives across Europe and replaced with expertly crafted fakes.
The discovery sparked a seven-year international investigation that reached as far as Paris and Brasilia.
Investigators found that the Barcelona copy had been sold in 2005 by Italian secondhand book dealers for 600,000 euros ($708,850), and then resold in 2011 for 900,000 euros.
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