5 Reais Olympic Games Rio 2016 - Rowing / Pau-Brasil

Brazil's Olympic commemorative program for Rio 2016 was among the most extensive in modern Games history, ultimately producing dozens of individual silver issues paired by sport and native species. The pau-brasil — Caesalpinia echinata — was the tree so aggressively harvested by Portuguese colonizers that it gave the country its name, its near-extinction by the eighteenth century standing as one of the earliest documented cases of colonial resource depletion in the Americas.

The .925 standard used across this series matches Brazilian coinage practice for collector issues of the period rather than any historical silver denomination.