The Villena Treasure, one of the greatest Bronze Age hoards, stolen in Spain

Fifty-nine objects, ten kilograms of gold and almost seven hundred grams of silver, which lay in the bed of a dried-up river near Alicante from the thirteenth century BC until December 1963, when the archaeologist José María Soler found them, survived three thousand three hundred years, a civil war and the Franco regime, but not the new European Union notion of security.

On the night of 27 August the criminals set off the alarm at a municipal sports centre nearby, and at the same time broke the window of a plant room at the MUVI museum and reached the display case with the treasures.

The Spanish media give differing figures for the length of the robbery, naming anything from ninety seconds to four minutes. Be that as it may, the museum's own guards had no time to respond.

The stolen hoard is the second most significant assemblage of prehistoric gold in Europe, after the Mycenaean tombs.

All I can say is that in the twenty-first century museum treasures are guarded against anyone at all except robbers