LA PAZ, MEXICO  - Bolivia will send an expert to the United States to examine a gold and silver treasure whose recovery from a suspected 19th-century Spanish ship by a US salvage firm has triggered an international dispute.

Bolivia's culture ministry said Wednesday the expert would try to determine whether the 17 tons of coins and other valuables brought up from the wreck of the ship off Portugal's coast came from its territory.

If the 500,000 coins recovered by the US company Odyssey in 2007 turn out to be from the Bolivian mining city of Potosi, La Paz intends to lay claim to the treasure, an archeology official in the ministry, Lupe Meneses, told La Razon newspaper.

"There are laws like the UNESCO convention of 1970 that uphold the repatriation and return of cultural items," he said, referring to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

It was unclear what access the unnamed expert had been given to study the treasure, which is worth an estimated 500 million dollars.

A claim to the hoard has already been made by Spain, the colonial-era master of much of Latin America.

Madrid believes the riches come from one of its frigates, Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, which was sunk by British warships in the Atlantic near Portugal in 1804 as it was sailing from Peru.

Odyssey, which has taken the recovered treasure back to the United States in the hopes of selling it, is fighting an initial court judgment in Spain's favor.

A Florida judge in June said the coins and artefacts should be sent to Spain after declaring he lacked jurisdiction to hear the matter but that the wreck appeared to be that of Nuestra Senora de la Mercedes.

Odyssey has refused to publicly divulge the identity of the ship, referring to it only as the "Black Swan Project."

During colonial times, Spain mined gold and silver from Bolivia's southwest Andes, extracting millions of tons of the precious metals from Potosi to finance its empire.

Peru has also said it has a right to claim the treasure if it is proven to come from the Spanish ship, based on the assumption that many of the precious items came from the country.

-AFP