1 Real Type VII Countermark

Costa Rica lacked a functioning mint for much of the mid-nineteenth century and relied heavily on countermarking foreign silver to legitimize it for domestic circulation. The Type VII punch — applied between 1849 and 1857 — was one of several successive countermark types used to authenticate and denominate incoming Spanish colonial and South American republican coinage, each type reflecting successive administrations struggling to impose monetary order on a coin supply they did not mint themselves.

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