20 Pesos

Costa Rica's 20 Pesos gold coinage of the 1870s was struck at a moment of acute monetary ambiguity — the country was simultaneously operating under its own national coinage law while remaining entangled in the Central American peso system inherited from the colonial period. The Casa de Moneda in San José had only been functioning with genuine consistency for a matter of decades, and large gold issues like this one were tied directly to coffee export revenues, which by the 1870s dominated the national economy almost entirely.

KM#119 is among the heavier gold pieces the mint produced in the nineteenth century. Surviving examples in any grade are genuinely scarce; most known specimens trace to European collections, suggesting significant quantities left the country as trade coin rather than circulating domestically.