20 Centavos Essai

This is a pattern piece submitted during Venezuela's monetary reorganization of the early 1870s, when the government was attempting to align its coinage with the Latin Monetary Union standards then being adopted across much of South America. Essais of this period were typically struck in Paris, where Venezuela contracted the majority of its coinage production — KM#E14 almost certainly originates there rather than from any domestic facility, as Venezuela had no functioning mint of its own at the time.

The 1874 date places this squarely in the Guzmán Blanco administration, which drove the country's modernization push and the formal adoption of the bolívar system the following year.