DNA bid to solve Columbus riddle

Two countries claim to hold the remains of Christopher Columbus

MADRID, Spain -- DNA technology could be used to settle a 500-year-old mystery -- where is Christopher Columbus buried?

Authorities in Seville, Spain, and Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, both claim to be watching over the remains of the famed explorer.

In a bid to settle the issue, Spanish history teacher Marcial Castro hopes to dig up both sets of bones and extract some strands of DNA.

Those samples will be compared with DNA from Hernando Colon, Columbus' son through an extramarital affair, whose remains are the only available, authenticated ones of a close relative of Columbus, Castro told the Associated Press.

They are buried at the cathedral in Seville, along with the bones that Spain says are his father's.

Castro, 38, who teaches in a public high school in Seville province, studies genealogy on the side and has published several papers on historical figures.

The Andalusian regional government has acted as intermediary and formally asked church officials in Seville to open Columbus' tomb.

Jose Antonio Lorente, director of the Laboratory of Genetic Identification of the University of Granada, will examine DNA from the various sets of remains.

Lorente usually works on criminal cases but has also helped identify people killed under military regimes in Latin America.

It is not yet clear if the authorities in both Spain and Santo Domingo will allow the bones to be disturbed.

In the Dominican Republic, a huge, cross-shaped monument called the Faro a Colon, or Columbus Lighthouse, also purports to hold Columbus' remains.

Columbus, who died in the Spanish city of Valladolid on May 20, 1506, had requested he be buried in the Americas, but no church of sufficient stature existed there so he was interred in a monastery in Valladolid.

Three years later, his remains were moved to a Carthusian monastery on the island of La Cartuja in Seville.

The tomb in the Dominican Republic where remains believed to be of the explorer are held

In 1537, Maria de Rojas y Toledo, widow of Columbus' son Diego, was allowed to send the bones of her husband and his father to the cathedral in Santo Domingo for burial.

There they remained until 1795, when Spain ceded the island of Hispaniola to France and decided Columbus' remains should not fall into the hands of foreigners.

So a set of remains that the Spaniards thought were Columbus' were dug up from behind the main altar in the newly built cathedral and shipped to a cathedral in Havana, Cuba, where they remained until the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898 and Spain brought them to Seville.

But in 1877, workers digging inside the Santo Domingo cathedral unearthed a leaden box containing 13 large bone fragments and 28 small ones.

It was inscribed "Illustrious and distinguished male, don Cristobal Colon."

The Dominicans said these were the real remains of Columbus and that the Spaniards must have taken the wrong body in 1795.

The remains the Dominicans found are the ones kept in the lighthouse.

Lorente, who has found a genetic match of 500-plus year-old bones from a Spanish nobleman and his mother, says he is optimistic he can obtain enough DNA to solve the Columbus quest.