Costa Rica lacked a functioning mint for most of the early republican period, relying instead on countermarked foreign silver — primarily Guatemalan and Mexican colonial milled coinage — to authenticate currency for domestic circulation. The Type V horse counterstamp was applied by official order to validate these pieces as legal tender, a practice that continued across several distinct counterstamp types as successive governments tried to assert control over a chaotic monetary supply.
KM#67 specifically identifies the host coin as a 2 Reales, but the counterstamp itself is what the Costa Rican state was issuing — the underlying coin's origin is almost incidental to the transaction.
Costa Rica lacked a functioning mint for most of the early republican period, relying instead on countermarked foreign silver — primarily Guatemalan and Mexican colonial milled coinage — to authenticate currency for domestic circulation. The Type V horse counterstamp was applied by official order to validate these pieces as legal tender, a practice that continued across several distinct counterstamp types as successive governments tried to assert control over a chaotic monetary supply.
KM#67 specifically identifies the host coin as a 2 Reales, but the counterstamp itself is what the Costa Rican state was issuing — the underlying coin's origin is almost incidental to the transaction.