100 Escudos Diogo Cão, Silver

Diogo Cão was the Portuguese navigator who erected the first stone padrões — inscribed limestone pillars claiming territory for the Portuguese crown — along the West African coast in the 1480s, reaching the Congo River in 1482 and pushing as far south as Cape Cross in present-day Namibia. His voyages systematically extended the southern limit of European geographic knowledge by hundreds of miles in a single decade.

This silver issue is the .925 fineness variant of a bimetallic commemorative series; the base-metal circulation version shares the same design but was struck for everyday use. The Gomes R77.02 designation places it within the collector-oriented run rather than the broader mintage.