4 Reales Type IV Counterstamp

Costa Rica lacked a functioning mint for most of the early republican period, relying instead on counterstamped foreign silver to serve domestic commerce. This Type IV application — the fourth iteration of Costa Rica's counterstamp program — was applied to circulating macuquina and milled coinage already in the monetary stream, effectively nationalizing foreign silver by fiat rather than by smelting and recoining it.

KM#51 is notoriously difficult to attribute cleanly: the host coin beneath the stamp matters considerably to specialists, and misattributed examples surface regularly at auction.