10 Pesos Iglesia Santa Bárbara

Issued as part of a Dominican commemorative gold series marking the turn of the millennium, this piece honors the Iglesia Santa Bárbara in Santo Domingo — one of the few surviving colonial-era churches in the Americas still bearing visible damage from the 1586 sacking of the city by Sir Francis Drake. The church was never fully rebuilt to its original plan after that raid, which makes it an unusual subject: a monument defined as much by what was destroyed as by what remains.