Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Museum, Maritime history museum in Key West, United States.
The Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Museum is a history museum in Key West displaying items recovered from sunken ships, mainly from the 1600s. The collection centers on two major Spanish galleons from 1622 along with other maritime treasures brought up from the ocean floor.
The museum is named after Mel Fisher, a treasure hunter who searched for sunken Spanish ships off Florida's coast. A Spanish fleet sank in a storm in 1622, and two of its ships became the focus of decades of underwater exploration and recovery.
The collection reveals how Spanish trade connected Europe and the Americas through ocean routes, showing what merchants and sailors carried across the Atlantic. These objects help visitors understand the daily realities of maritime commerce in past centuries.
Visitors should expect to see small, delicate items that have been underwater for centuries, displayed in contained gallery spaces. The manageable size of the museum means you can spend as much time as needed examining details without feeling rushed.
In the basement of the museum, conservators work daily to preserve objects pulled from salt water, with some pieces requiring years of treatment before display. This behind-the-scenes effort reveals how challenging it is to save treasures once the ocean has claimed them.
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