Madrid ( CNN ) -- A treasure worth an estimated half billion dollars in gold and silver coins , recovered from a Spanish warship that sunk two centuries ago , arrived in Madrid Saturday , just weeks after U.S. courts ruled that Spain had rights to the loot , not the Florida deep-sea salvage company which found it on the ocean floor . Two Spanish military cargo planes , which retrieved the nearly 594,000 coins in crates from a secretive warehouse in Florida , landed at the Torrejon military air base in Madrid just before 2 p.m. ( 8 a.m . ET ) . The two planes arrived at a U.S. military base in Florida earlier this week -- on the heels of a team of Spanish government experts who did an inventory of the treasure -- and departed on Friday for the overnight flight to Madrid . That was after the Florida company , Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. had exhausted its legal appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court , which declined without comment Odyssey 's motion for a hearing earlier this month . `` Spain has now been victorious at every level in the United States courts , from Tampa to Atlanta to Washington , '' said Jim Goold , who defended Spain 's claim to the treasure . `` I am pleased and proud for all of us . '' Odyssey Marine Exploration made an emergency appeal to the high court in an attempt to block a lower court 's order that it turn over the treasure to Spain . The dispute goes back to 2007 , when Odyssey announced it had found a 19th-century sunken ship off of Spain . The company claimed ownership of the coins and said it had flown them to a guarded location in the United States . Spain filed suit in a federal court in Tampa , Florida , also claiming the treasure . Spain says its navy warship Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes was carrying the coins . The 34-gun frigate left Peru in 1804 and crossed the Atlantic to within a day 's sail from Spain when British ships attacked the Spanish fleet . In the ensuing Battle of Cape St. Mary , south of Portugal , the Mercedes was hit in its powder magazine and exploded , according to the Spanish government 's filing to the Florida court . In 2009 , the federal court in Tampa ruled in favor of Spain and the federal appeals court in Atlanta upheld the ruling last September . Last January 31 , the appeals court denied an Odyssey motion , which Odyssey appealed to the Supreme Court . Spain 's Culture Minister , Jose Ignacio Wert , told CNN in Madrid earlier this month that the case was never really about the money . `` We 're not going to use this money for purposes other than artistic exhibition , but this is something that enriches our material , artistic capital and it has to be appreciated as such , '' Wert said in an interview . He said the coins would be exhibited at Spanish museums , and perhaps elsewhere . Peru , too , has followed the fate of the coins , which came from Latin America when Peru was a Spanish colony . `` Formally , they have n't claimed anything , but we are completely open to consider the possibility of distributing some part of the treasure also among the Latin American museums , '' Wert said . The treasure includes fabled `` pieces of eight , '' some minted in 1803 in Lima , Peru , Spanish officials have said . The treasure , which already has crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice , by ship in 1804 and then by plane in 2007 , has now arrived on the Spanish mainland for the first time . A Spanish Defense Ministry official at the Torrejon base said the treasure will be turned over to Spain 's paramilitary Civil Guard for safekeeping . The Culture Ministry is expected to hold a news conference and possibly show off a portion of the coins in the coming days .
A treasure estimated worth half a billion dollars arrived in Spain . The coins had been the object of a legal battle in the United States . The company that found the treasure lost its claim in the courts .