2 Reales - Felipe V

This coin was almost certainly among the thousands lost when the 1715 Plate Fleet — eleven Spanish ships carrying colonial silver northward through the Florida Straits — was destroyed by a hurricane in July of that year. Recovery operations began almost immediately and have continued intermittently for three centuries, making fleet-salvage examples with contemporary documentation among the most historically traceable pieces in Mexican colonial numismatics.

Felipe V, the first Bourbon king of Spain, inherited the throne following the extinction of the Habsburg line and a thirteen-year war over the succession. Mexican cob coinage of his reign shows little of the administrative reform that would later produce the milled series — the macuquina fabric remained essentially unchanged from Habsburg practice.