500 Ekueles Elobey islands

Elobey Grande and Elobey Chico are two tiny islands off Equatorial Guinea's coast that briefly hosted one of colonial Africa's more obscure administrative posts — a Spanish telegraph station that connected the Gulf of Guinea to the Atlantic cable network in the early twentieth century. The islands have been effectively uninhabited for decades. Coins invoking them belong to Equatorial Guinea's long-running series of collector-targeted issues, produced in low quantities for the numismatic market rather than domestic circulation, a practice the country has pursued aggressively since the 1990s through various foreign minting arrangements.