Thieves have stolen the Treasure of Villena – one of the greatest bronze age gold collections – in the latest high-profile heist of a European museum, officials said.The early morning raid on the 50-plus mainly gold objects in the Spanish town of Villena on Thursday lasted just minutes.“The alarm at the Villena Museum went off around 5.20am [4.20am BST],” a spokesperson for the town council said, adding that the thieves had left the building by 5.24am.The operation was “super-fast and super-professional”, the spokesperson said.“They’ve taken most of the treasure,” the mayor of Villena, Fulgencio Cerdán, told journalists, his voice breaking.“We are absolutely devastated, I’m even trembling. The truth is that for those of us from Villena, this destroys us. It’s part of our heritage, of our wealth,” Cerdán said.The 29 bracelets, 11 bowls, three bottles, and other miscellaneous pieces of the collection kept in the Alicante provincial town’s museum are mainly gold, but there are also pieces of silver, iron and amber, all dating back to about 1000BC. The treasure was discovered in 1963 by the archaeologist José María Soler in a vessel sunk in a dried-up riverbed in Villena.While the treasure’s historical value is incalculable, the gold alone is worth about €1.7m (£1.4m; $2m), according to the mayor.The thieves arrived in several vehicles and apparently entered the museum through a window, according to the Spanish government’s deputy representative in Alicante, Manuel Pineda.“All security systems were activated,” according to the Villena spokesperson, who insisted there had been “no failure” by the museum.Shortly before the robbery, another alarm went off at the city’s sports centre, and authorities were now investigating whether that was a diversion created by the thieves, the spokesperson added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast October, thieves broke into the Louvre museum in Paris in broad daylight, escaping in less than eight minutes with jewellery worth €88m. There have since been a series of brazen raids in institutions across Europe.Four works “of extraordinary value” by the Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina were stolen from a museum in Sicily, Italy’s culture ministry said last Sunday.Two days earlier, Italian police said they had recovered paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth more than $10.4m which were stolen from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation Museum near Parma.