Thieves took the gold of Villena in four minutes after a sports-hall diversion

The Treasure of Villena left the town museum in the time it takes to walk through it. At 05:16 on Thursday the alarm went off at the municipal sports hall on the edge of Villena, in Alicante province. Four minutes later, at 05:20, the museum alarm followed. By 05:24 the thieves were gone.

Guardia Civil recordings show three hooded people. The mayor, Fulgencio Cerdán, said they took "a large part of the treasure," specifically the gold. What they left, he said, were three silver vessels, a bracelet, most of a staff's ornaments, one of four crowns that fell as they ran, and an earring. They also took three crowns of the Virgin and Child held in the same building. The museum has no reopening date.

The hoard was found on 1 December 1963 by José María Soler in a ceramic pot in the Rambla del Panadero. Standard inventories list about 66 pieces: 11 gold bowls, 28 bracelets, gold bottles, silver bottles, amber and gold, and two iron objects later shown to be meteoritic. The gold weighs nearly ten kilograms. Local officials have put a cash figure near €5 million. The archaeological value sits with the Mycenaean shaft graves as the main comparison in Europe.

A collection that had never left town

Manuel Olcina, director of the provincial museum in Alicante, called the theft historic. The pieces had not travelled. They sat in a reinforced case in a small municipal museum. The town hall said every alarm fired and that there was "no failure" by staff. Police were first sent to the sports hall.

The same 24 hours produced a second European jewellery theft. Two men posing as visitors smashed a case at Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts and took a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace of 673 diamonds that Queen Nazli of Egypt wore in 1939. It last sold at Sotheby's in 2015 for about $4.3 million. Villena is older metal, and it is gone as a set.