Colombia-Numismatics

1620–1819

The Santa Fe mint

The mint of the New Kingdom: hammered cobs, then milled coin with a reeded edge, and the sister house at Popayán.

Around 1590 Philip II ordered a mint at Santafé that never opened. The Banco de la República dates the effective founding to 1620: Philip III authorized the engineer Alonso Turrillo de Yebra to strike silver and, for the first time in the Americas, gold. Turrillo began in 1621 in a rented low house in La Candelaria and for a time kept an office at Cartagena de Indias, closed about 1634. Until then the New Kingdom paid mainly in tejuelos, bars, and gold dust. The first pieces were hammered cobs — metal poured into moulds, thinned by hammer, cut with shears, and struck between two dies: 1- and 2-escudo gold and ½, ¼, 1, 2, 4, and 8 reales silver, with mintmark N.R. The Mesuno hoard holds Santafé doblones of 1629–1636. In the seventeenth century the works were a smithy: Antioquia and Chocó gold was refined. In 1751 the Crown took the mint into royal administration. Almost half a century later, under Ferdinand VI, the house was enlarged for circular-coin machinery; the 1753 architectural reform was directed by Tomás Sánchez Reciente under Viceroy Alfonso Pizarro. Viceroy Solís reopened it in 1756 — the year is still on the stone doorway — and screw presses made round reeded coin so clipping of the edge would show. Reserved cédulas of 1771 and 1786 secretly lowered gold and silver fineness. Popayán was authorized by a royal cédula of 1729; Pedro Agustín de Valencia began reeded coin there in 1758 as a private treasurer. Banrepcultural’s encyclopedia records the closure after disputes and the 1766 royal cédula; the 1996 exhibition booklet places the transfer to royal property in 1770. Adolfo Meisel lists the eighteenth-century finenesses: gold at 0.916½, 0.901, and 0.875; silver near 0.902. Luis Ángel Arango gives the carat of those cédulas: the ordinance of 13 December 1751 set gold at 22 carats; the royal cédula of 18 March 1771 secretly lowered it to 21 carats and 2½ granos (0.901); that of 25 February 1786, also reserved, left it at 21 carats (0.875) from 10 January 1787. Peruvian and Mexican cobs arriving with situados joined that local coin.

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  1 escudo · Popayán P–JF · 1801

  An 1801 gold escudo struck at Popayán in the name of Charles IV. The obverse carries the bust and the date; the reverse, the value 1 S and the marks P · JF.

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  1 escudo · Popayán P–JF · 1806

  An 1806 gold escudo struck at Popayán for Charles IV. The obverse carries the bust and the date; the reverse, the value 1 S and the marks P · JF.

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  1 escudo · Popayán P–JF · 1808

  An 1808 gold escudo struck at Popayán in the name of Charles IV. The obverse carries the bust, the legend CAROL IIII, and the date; the reverse, the value 1 S and the marks P · JF.

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  2 escudos · Popayán P–SF · 1791

  A 1791 gold 2 escudos struck at Popayán in the name of Charles IV, with the bust of Charles III. The obverse carries the ordinal IV and the date; the reverse, the value 2 S and the marks P · SF.

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  8 escudos · Popayán P–JF · 1801

  An 1801 gold 8 escudos struck at Popayán for Charles IV. The obverse carries the bust and the date; the reverse, the value 8 S and the marks P · JF.

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  1 real · Bogotá NR–JF · 1810

  An 1810 silver real struck at Santa Fe de Nuevo Reino in the name of Ferdinand VII. The obverse keeps Charles IV’s bust; the reverse names mint NR, value 1R, and assayer JF.

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1810–1830

Independence and Gran Colombia

Cartagena coppers, Nariño and Bolívar’s china coin, and the jumble of finenesses after Boyacá.

In 1811 the Santafé mint went into crisis as gold output fell and funds were diverted to the patriot cause; even private financing was used to keep it open. Cartagena’s junta ordered half-real and two-real coppers, struck through 1815. This collection holds a 2 reales of that copper, with the date unread and without a weight or diameter. Numista leaves type KM# D1 without a published weight or diameter; the half-real figures of the same junta measure a different disc. From then on legends are in Castilian — colonial coin had been in Latin. In Santa Fe, Nariño ordered the provincial china coin in 1813 — the Indian bust, “libertad americana” — to fund the Southern Campaign; it was struck from 1814 to 1816. After Boyacá, Bolívar took the Bogotá and Popayán mints and, on 18 August 1819, asked for the same type. Popayán stayed in royalist hands until 1821; they took the dies when they fled. Meisel, following Barriga Villalba and Restrepo, also records royalist coppers at Popayán (1813), the 1816 patriot feble, Santa Marta silver ordered by Viceroy Montalvo — and the 1820 copper siege cuartillo — and the low-fineness caraqueña that came with Morillo. The Cúcuta Congress of 1821 tried to restore Spanish weight and fineness; Santander evaded the rule with low-fineness issues antedated to 1821. The museum booklet records the first republican peso of 1825 — equal to 8 silver reales or ½ gold escudo. This collection holds the 1826 Bogotá gold peso, assayer JF. Banrepcultural’s encyclopedia also records low-fineness cobs struck on the Caracas pattern in Casanare.

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  2 reales · Cartagena · ca. 1812–1814

  Siege copper of the State of Cartagena. Rim “…O · DE · CARTA…”. The date is unread; this specimen was not weighed or measured.

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  1/4 real · Santa Marta · 1820

  A copper siege cuartillo: a crown over 1/4 and 1820; on the other side, a cross dividing the letters S and M of Santa Marta.

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  8 reales · Bogotá BA–JF · 1821

  An 1821 8 reales with the Indian of American liberty. On the reverse, the pomegranate of Cundinamarca, Bogotá’s BA mintmark, and assayer JF.

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  1 peso · Bogotá JF · 1826

  An 1826 gold peso struck at Bogotá. The obverse carries Liberty and the date; the reverse, the arms of Gran Colombia and the initials J · F.

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1831–1886

New Granada and the United States of Colombia

The 1836 unification, the 1846–1847 decimal reform, and the mints of a country that changed its name three times.

After Gran Colombia dissolved, the law of 20 April 1836 repealed the Cúcuta rules and tried to unify fineness, weight, value, type, and denomination, with gold to silver at 1 to 16: the eight-real piece was named granadino de plata and the gold peso granadino de oro. Cobs and clipped coin stayed in the market; their withdrawal, already ordered in 1826, was not finished until about 1848. In Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera’s first government, Lino de Pombo and Florentino González imposed 0.900 fine metal and a decimal system in 1846–1847: base coinage stopped and what was taken in was restruck. The peso, which in 1837 had replaced the real at eight reales to the peso, was split into ten reales — later décimos, from 1853. The law of 27 April 1847 ordered the silver granadino of ten reales, 25 g at 0.900 fine, and admitted French, Belgian, and Sardinian silver at two reales to the franc. The law of 30 June 1857 made the peso the unit — those same 25 g at 0.900, divided into one hundred centavos — and authorized the gold cóndor of ten pesos, 16.129 g at 0.900. Hernández records coins already denominated in centavos in 1871 and 1872, among them the 2 pesos of those years and the 10 centavos of 1872, while the annex still lists décimos in 1873 and 1874. That 25 g peso is what makes the centavo on later cards legible. In 1813 Juan del Corral had asked Caldas for machinery for a Medellín mint; the reconquest aborted the project. The 1996 exhibition booklet dates the State of Antioquia’s first work to 1862 — a gold peso of that year, one of the two examples it records. The Bank’s Numismatic Collection places the Medellín house at 1866–1947. The measure of 26 May 1866 authorized a cut in silver fineness except the peso, and the public hoarded those pesos. In the 1880s Bogotá and Medellín installed steam presses from Ralph Heaton & Sons, Birmingham. Under the Granadine Confederation and the United States of Colombia (1863–1886) silver pesos and gold from the three mints remained convertible, while free-banking paper began to circulate beside them.

This case does not yet hold pieces from this period. Visual catalog for this period

from 1886

The Republic and the coin factory

The Regeneración peso, administration by the Banco de la República, and the move of striking to Ibagué.

The 1886 constitution restored the name Republic of Colombia; the gold peso remained the standard while Banco Nacional paper and the Thousand Days’ War wrecked convertibility. Popayán ceased in 1881 and did not return. Bogotá and Medellín closed about 1890; the shortage of coin led to an order in New York for 50-centavo silver with the profile of Soledad Román de Núñez — the cocobolas . Under Reyes (1904–1909) paper-money pesos were struck in cupronickel — 1, 2, and 5 pesos p/m, equal to 1, 2, and 5 centavos — with a Peace bust; Hernández dates the module at Brussels and Bogotá from 1907 to 1916. They are not banknotes. The 1996 booklet sums up Reyes’s settlement: each of those paper-money pesos equaled one gold centavo. Arango specifies Law 19 of 1905, which converted the paper into gold at one hundred to one, and legislative decree 47 of 1905, which authorized the Banco Central. Law 25 of 1923, on the Kemmerer mission’s project, created the Banco de la República; the same booklet dates the opening to 23 July 1923 and treats the peso oro as the pledge to convert the note. That convertibility was withdrawn in 1931. Distinct, and earlier, are the Palonegro necessity coscojas (1902): Bucaramanga brass with a Santander legend, made from rifle-cartridge cases. After Reyes, Bogotá resumed in 1906 and Medellín in 1914. The last gold was struck at Medellín in 1930 — 5 pesos. From 1912, article 127 of the Fiscal Code, as Arango records it, set the gold peso at 1.5976 g, 0.91676 fine. Five of those pesos gather the fine gold of a pound sterling: Hernández gives the Medellín 5 pesos as 7.988 g and calls it a libra esterlina, and the 1996 booklet calls it the Colombian libra. Numista transcribes CINCO PESOS and the fineness 0.916⅔ on that module; “libra esterlina” is the catalog name, and the parity is statutory. The war with Peru (1932) drove large 50-centavo silver strikes; in the Second World War nickel ran short and the 1-, 2-, and 5-centavo pieces switched to copper. In 1947–1948 the last 50-centavo silver, 0.500 fine, was struck.

The 1996 booklet still shows a copper 1 centavo of Bogotá dated 1957. Hernández’s annex notes a 10 centavos of 1952, a 20 of 1956, a 50 of 1969 with Santander’s bust, and a 5 centavos of 1971. BanRep’s coin tables open in 1987 and already have no centavo column: that year the smallest value is the peso.

On 9 April 1948 Antonio María Barriga and the staff defended the house in the Bogotazo with refining chlorine and the workshop masks. The Banco de la República, on its Coin Factory timeline, took over the Bogotá mint by contract in 1946 (the 1996 booklet dates that contract to 1942) and bought the Medellín mint in 1953. Luis Ángel Arango pushed, at mid-century, to conserve the building; a first public numismatic museum opened in the early 1960s (1961 in a 2020 classroom presentation; 1962 in the Bank’s 2023 *Tesoros* catalog). Decree 1584 of 11 August 1975 declared it a national monument. From the 1970s the colonial cloister — Calle 11 no. 4-93 — was restored, work that finished in 1982, the same year Ibagué, separately, began making planchets . In 1980 planchets were still imported; director Luis Guillermo Correa proposed making them in Colombia. In 1982 the Ibagué plant opened and in 1987 striking moved there: Santa Fe ceased after 366 years. Some Ibagué presses reach four hundred pieces a minute. Law 31 of 1993 folded the mint into the issuing bank, and that year the first bimetallic 500-peso was struck. González White’s essay records the alpaca 50 pesos from 1989. The same BanRep tables record 100 pesos from 1992. The 200 pesos, Dicken Castro’s Quimbaya motif, began to circulate on 1 July 1994. The permanent exhibition opened in December 1996. In 2012 the family that honors biodiversity and water appeared; the next year it took first place worldwide as best circulating series. BanRep’s tables later record 10,000-peso commemoratives (2021 and 2023) and 20,000-peso commemoratives (2023–2024: the Bank’s centenary, the Antioquian carriel, and Santa Marta’s fifth centenary). This case will gather, as they are documented, colonial, independence, and republican types — as the Philippines notes and Colombian paper already do.

Lazaretto coin begins before the 1921 records and the disc dated 1931: decree 300 of 1901 and the 1907 series are on Numismatics of the Lazarettos . KM, Hernández, and Restrepo do not list that 1931, and the record assigns it no number.

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  2 centavos · Lazaretto · 1921

  A 1921 cupronickel 2 centavos, struck at Bogotá for the lazaretto cordon. The obverse shows the cross with LAZARETO and the date; the reverse, the value inside a wreath.

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  50 centavos · Lazaretto · 1931

  A 50 centavos with the lazaretto cross and the date 1931 on the disc. The design belongs to that series. KM, Hernández, and Restrepo do not list that year, and this record assigns it no number.

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  50 centavos · Santander · 1902

  A 1902 brass necessity piece of the State of Santander. The obverse carries SANTANDER, 50, and the date; the reverse is incuse and reversed.

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  20 centavos · Santander · 1902

  A 1902 brass necessity piece of the State of Santander. The obverse carries SANTANDER, 20, and the date; the reverse is incuse and reversed.

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  10 centavos · Santander · 1902

  An undated brass necessity piece of the State of Santander, struck in 1902. The obverse carries SANTANDER, 10, and C; the reverse is incuse and reversed.

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  50 centavos · Bolívar · 1916

  A 1916 silver 50 centavos with Bolívar facing right. The design matches KM# 193.1, small date, Birmingham or Bogotá. This disc was not weighed.

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