20 Réis - José I

José I ascended the Portuguese throne in 1750, and these copper pieces for Angola were among the earliest colonial issues struck under his authority. Angola at the time was less a coherent territorial administration than a loose network of coastal trading posts anchored at Luanda, and coinage of any kind was scarce enough that these reis circulated alongside commodity currencies — most notably cloth and iron bars in the interior trade routes.

The Bentes reference places this squarely in the established colonial copper sequence, though surviving examples with legible dates are considerably scarcer than the type's five-year production window might suggest.