2 Reales San Cristobal

Tachira's 1872 issue was an emergency provincial coinage, struck at a time when Venezuela's central government was too fractured by caudillo politics to maintain reliable currency supply in the Andean frontier states. San Cristóbal, the state capital, authorized its own bronze pieces rather than leave commerce dependent on whatever federal or foreign coin happened to circulate. Provincial Venezuelan issues of this kind are genuinely rare survivors — most were demonetized and melted once Guzmán Blanco's centralizing reforms took hold after 1870.