Spanish archaeologists have documented a 2,500-year-old Phoenician shipwreck off the coast of Mazarron, Spain. The Mazarron II, an eight-meter-long vessel, was named after the municipality in Murcia where it was discovered. A team of nine technicians from the University of Valencia spent over two weeks scuba diving and recording the ship’s cracks and fissures. The experts plan to recommend methods to protect and salvage the wreck, possibly as early as next summer. One suggestion is to extract and reassemble the ship piece by piece outside of the water. The archaeologists believe it is more reasonable to preserve the ship in a museum rather than leaving it exposed to potential destruction by storms. The Phoenicians, who inhabited present-day Lebanon and Syria, used the vessel to transport metals such as lead from the Iberian Peninsula around 580 BC. The ship sank and remained buried in sediment until it was unearthed 30 years ago. Currently, the wreck is submerged under 1.7 meters of clear Mediterranean water and is surrounded by sandbags and a sinking metal structure that threatens to damage it.