10 Euros - Felipe VI Civil Guard

This issue belongs to a long-running Spanish commemorative program honoring national institutions, in this case the Guardia Civil, which was founded by royal decree in 1844 under the Duke of Ahumada. The corps was established partly to suppress the widespread banditry that had made large portions of rural Spain effectively ungovernable in the post-Napoleonic decades — a mandate that shaped its paramilitary structure from the outset.

Felipe VI's effigy appears under the constitutional authority restored after the Franco dictatorship, making every coin bearing his portrait a product of a mint that itself operated under radically different political conditions just decades prior.