50 centavos coin, 1916

The piece

This piece is a 1916 50 centavos with the bust of Simón Bolívar facing right. The obverse carries the legend REPUBLICA DE COLOMBIA — without an accent, as engraved — and the date 1916 between dots, below the neck truncation. The reverse shows the arms under a condor, the legend CINCUENTA CENTAVOS, the type weight 12.500, and the fineness LEY 0.900. That design is what Numista (N#20273) catalogs as KM# 193.1, small date, in the Birmingham/Bogotá module, with a mintage of 1,060,000 pieces. Numista sets KM# 193.2 of Medellín apart by larger letters and by the wing and flags sitting closer to the legend; that gap was not measured on this worn disc, and the piece carries no mint letter. CoinVarieties records the 1916(b) as KM 193.1, struck for Bogotá, with the same mintage of 1,060,000, silver 0.900, 12.5 g, and 0.361 troy ounces of fine silver, and gives the edge the legend DIOS LEI LIBERTAD. Greysheet gives the same 1916 KM-193.1, small date, as 12.5 g and 30 mm, and lists a reeded edge. 11.25 g is the product of the 12.5 g type weight and 0.900; it is not an assay of this disc. The edge was not photographed separately, and the two faces, set upright for reading, do not fix the axis. BanRep’s coin tables begin in 1987 and do not cover 1916. The figure of 1,300,000 belongs to Philadelphia’s KM# 274 (CoinVarieties), a separate issue of the same year. CoinVarieties notes that the Bolívar bust replaced the Liberty head, whose last date it places in 1908, and calls the 1916 Bogotá date common; no surviving-population census is published. Hernández’s glossary calls the 50 centavos of 1916, among other dates, the Bolívar de Roulin, or fat face, and names the French physician François Désiré Roulin. The bust is unsigned, and the photograph does not separate that face from the thin one. The 1902 brass 50 centavos of Santander and the lazaretto disc dated 1931 are other records. Unslabbed. The wear, the dark mottling, and the surface marks show in the photographs; they do not authenticate the metal or assign a numerical grade.

Scarcity

Numista assigns 1,060,000 pieces to the 1916 small date of KM# 193.1 (Birmingham/Bogotá). CoinVarieties repeats that mintage for the 1916(b) and calls the date common. The figure of 1,300,000 is Philadelphia’s KM# 274. BanRep’s coin tables begin in 1987. This record publishes neither prices nor a slab census.

Related pieces

Other records from the same issuer or era in this case.

• 10 centavos · Santander · 1902
• 20 centavos · Santander · 1902
• 50 centavos · Santander · 1902
• 50 centavos · Lazaretto · 1931