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 applications used to authenticate and re-authorize coins already in circulation, many of them Spanish colonial cobs or milled reales from Guatemala, Mexico, and elsewhere in the former empire. The host coin's origin matters considerably to collectors; the same countermark applied to different host types carries meaningfully different scarcity.