1 Real Type IV Counterstamp

In the 1840s, Costa Rica faced a chronic shortage of reliable small silver coinage and responded by counterstamping foreign and domestic pieces to authenticate them for local circulation. The Type IV counterstamp — applied to 1 Real hosts — represents one of several successive validation campaigns as authorities attempted to distinguish genuine coins from the debased and fraudulent pieces that had flooded Central American markets following independence.

Host coins vary considerably, and identifying the origin of the underlying piece is often as numismatically significant as the counterstamp itself.