5 Dollars Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas

Issued to mark the quincentenary of Columbus's 1492 landfall, which most scholars now place at San Salvador — an island in the present-day Bahamas — this piece carries a genuinely direct geographic claim that few commemoratives can match. Columbus almost certainly anchored in Bahamian waters before proceeding south toward Cuba, making the Central Bank's choice of subject something more than symbolic convenience.

The 1990s quincentenary generated commemorative coinage from dozens of nations, most with far thinner connections to the event.