2 Reales Type IV Countermark

El Salvador had no functioning mint of its own in the early 1860s, so the government authorized countermarking foreign silver — predominantly Guatemalan and Bolivian reales — to validate them as legal tender. The Type IV punch, applied between 1862 and 1863, is distinguished from earlier Salvadoran countermark types by its specific die characteristics, though host coin identification matters considerably: the premium on any given example depends almost entirely on what it was struck on and where that host coin originated.