20 Balboas Vasco Nunez de Balboa

Panama's large-format silver issues of this period were tied directly to the country's nationalistic reclamation of the Canal Zone — the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties had set the handover process in motion, and commemorative coinage became one vehicle through which Panama asserted its cultural identity during the transition years. Balboa himself crossed the Darién in 1513, becoming the first European to sight the Pacific from the Americas — the very isthmus over which the canal dispute had raged for a century.

The .500 fineness puts this well below sterling, a cost-reduction measure that became standard in Panamanian commemorative silver after the mid-1970s fiscal pressures.