1 Escudo Pattern

Portugal struck a series of pattern coins for its African territories in the early 1960s as the Estado Novo regime worked to standardize colonial coinage ahead of what Lisbon still refused to acknowledge might become independence movements. São Tomé and Príncipe, a tiny cocoa-producing island territory in the Gulf of Guinea, received little numismatic attention — which is precisely why so few of these patterns were ever struck, and fewer still documented outside the Gomes reference.

The Gomes E4.04 designation places this firmly in the experimental series, never approved for circulation.