2500 Dollars Christopher Columbus

Issued to mark the anticipated quincentennial run-up, this piece was part of a wider Bahamian programme of large-format gold issues that the Central Bank used sporadically through the 1970s and 1980s to generate hard currency revenue rather than for any domestic monetary purpose. At 407 grams of .917 gold, fewer than a handful of sovereign coin issues anywhere in the Western Hemisphere have ever exceeded it in gold content.

Columbus made his first Caribbean landfall at San Salvador — part of the modern Bahamas — on 12 October 1492, which gives the issuing authority a geographically legitimate claim few other nations could assert for a Columbus commemorative.