Chilean Coins

Chile has been minting coins at the Casa de Moneda in Santiago since 1743 — nearly three centuries of production from a single facility perched between the Andes and the Pacific. The coins that have come from that mint trace the full history of a country that fought for independence in the early nineteenth century and has been reinventing its economy, its government, and its currency ever since.
 
The Chilean coins in this collection carry the portrait of Bernardo O'Higgins, the half-Irish liberator who led the country to independence and whose face has appeared on Chilean money for over a century — surviving every change of government, every economic crisis, and every currency reform without ever being replaced. He crossed from the escudo to the peso the way he crossed the Andes: without hesitation.
 
Chile has used multiple currencies since independence — the peso, the condor, the escudo, and the peso again. Each transition reset the denominations and started the count over, but the republic's name and its founding father's portrait remained constants. Every Chilean coin from before the current era is an artifact of a monetary system that was replaced, carrying a denomination that made sense on the day it was struck and a portrait that still makes sense now.