According to the researcher at the History, Territories and Communities Institute, at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, who has been diving and studying underwater finds for 25 years, the database he created identified 8,620 shipwrecks in this maritime territory.

"I have around 7,500 ships for the mainland coast, around 1,000 for the Azores and 120 ships for the coast of Madeira", he said, explaining that these are ships from after 1500, when documentation began to exist.

This identification is the first step, a starting point to go after the ship.

And he said that when he was in the Azores, he found reference, in a footnote, to the loss of a flagship from 1615 - Nossa Senhora da Luz, in Faial.

"I wanted to find this ship. It took me four years to research various archives and, after those four years, I dived and on the first dive I found the wreck site," he said.

"When treasure hunting companies came knocking on the door of the Azores regional government, our biggest drama was that we didn't know how many ships and where they were. We knew, we suspected, but our knowledge was zero," he said.

The situation is different today and it is precisely from this database that Alexandre Monteiro states that there are around 250 ships with treasures that were lost in the territorial waters of the Azores, Madeira and the Portuguese mainland coast and that remain there.

Asked whether the Portuguese Government is aware of this information, the researcher said that it was published, but that no one did anything.

Regarding the risk of these treasures being at the mercy of treasure hunters, Alexandre Monteiro said that "it's difficult, because everything will be under the sand".

"If I spent a month working on the project, I would find the ship", he assured.

And he lamented: "We know that there are 250 ships with treasures and we know that, sooner or later, a port project, something like this will be found. There is no contingency plan to protect a find like this."