[PatrickHenry]

Do you recall how often the treasure fleets sailed for Spain? I think it was every three years, 4-10 galleons at a time.

I've read that the fleet gathered in Havana Harbor and then sailed every year, for about two centuries (1500s and 1600s) until pirates made it impossible. Every year, the fleet was around 100 ships, some were military escorts, but the rest held treasure. Spain looted Mexico and the Incas of everything, plus they were operating sliver mines, etc. The wealth they hauled back to Spain every year was fantastic.

[livius]

And they wasted it all on foreign wars in Northern Europe. There is one particularly odd sight I remember seeing in the town of Plasencia in Extremadura (western Spain), where a number of sailors had come from and which received substantial amounts in gold every year. They had started to build a lavish new church - and then suddenly they stopped, because the king needed all of the gold for his foreign wars. The church, hundreds of years later, is still only half-built.