500 Escudos Eça de Queiroz, Bimetallic foil silver and gold

Eça de Queiroz died in Paris in August 1900, and this coin marks the centenary of that death — not his birth, a distinction worth noting given how frequently commemorative programs conflate the two. The novelist had spent much of his adult life as a Portuguese consul abroad, in Havana, Bristol, and finally Paris, a biographical irony given how savagely his fiction dissected Portuguese provincial insularity. The bimetallic foil construction — silver centre, gold ring — was a technically ambitious format INCM deployed selectively for prestige commemoratives at the turn of the millennium.