1 Colón Counterstamped Coinage

In 1923, Costa Rica faced an acute shortage of domestic coinage and an equally acute shortage of silver blanks to remedy it. The solution was pragmatic to the point of bluntness: existing foreign silver coins — primarily Colombian and Venezuelan pieces already circulating in the country — were counterstamped with the new denomination and put back into use. The legal basis was a decree authorizing the Banco Internacional de Costa Rica to validate these foreign pieces as national currency at face value.

KM#163 encompasses several host coin types, and attribution requires identifying the underlying piece before the counterstamp.