5 Centavos

Chile's copper-nickel minor coinage of this period survived an extraordinary stretch of monetary instability. The peso collapsed repeatedly against gold during the 1920s, and the Great Depression hammered nitrate exports — the fiscal backbone of the Chilean state — driving currency reform efforts throughout the 1930s. Minor denominations like this one continued circulating largely because there was nothing practical to replace them with during the successive monetary crises.

Production ran across multiple years under the Santiago mint, with annualized mintage figures varying sharply depending on budget allocations and metal availability.