On beach along the skeleton Coast, the sand is filled with diamonds. But in April 2008, workers found something very different: a piece of lost history a shipwreck and its treasure.
The story began when a worker from the nearby diamond mines found a piece of metal on the beach. it was a piece of copper.
Soon, they found more copper and many gold coins.
The workers then found that these came from the remains of a large ship. The shipwreck was the real treasure.
Archeologists studied the shipwreck.
They thought the ship probably came from Portugal about 500 years before.
However,it was difficult to find information about it.
in 1775, many maps and books about the ships of the time were lost in a fire in Lisbon.
''Theat left a big hole in our history'' says Portuguese archeologist Alexandre Monteiro.