1/4 Real - Ferdinand VII

Santo Domingo's copper coinage of this period emerged from administrative necessity rather than monetary ambition. By 1813, the colony had changed hands repeatedly — ceded to France in 1795, occupied by Haitian forces, retaken by a Spanish expeditionary force in 1809 — and the chronic shortage of small-denomination currency made local copper issues unavoidable. The 1/4 real filled a transactional gap that Spanish metropolitan silver could never reliably supply to a colony this far down the imperial supply chain.

KM#2 is among the scarcest colonial copper issues of the Caribbean, with surviving examples frequently showing irregular flans from rudimentary local production.