1 Real Type I Countermark

Costa Rica's monetary infrastructure in the early 1840s was almost entirely dependent on foreign silver circulating without official sanction. The solution was a countermarking campaign: existing Spanish colonial and Central American Federation reales were stamped with the national mark to legitimize them as domestic currency, sidestepping the expense of a full mint operation. The Casa Nacional de Moneda in Cartago handled the work.

Host coins vary considerably, and the countermark itself is often weakly applied — a direct consequence of the improvised nature of the program. Finding a specimen where both the host coin's type and the countermark are simultaneously clear is genuinely difficult.