Portuguese Coins

Portuguese coins carry the history of a republic that survived more than most — a monarchy overthrown in 1910, a dictatorship that lasted from 1933 to 1974, a revolution that ended it without a war, and an integration into Europe that eventually replaced the national currency with a shared one. The escudo served through all of it. The denomination that paid soldiers in colonial wars in Africa and bought coffee in Lisbon after the Carnation Revolution was the same denomination that circulated through Portugal's entry into the European Economic Community and its adoption of the euro in 2002.

The coins in this collection span the Republic era, carrying the coat of arms with its quinas shield — the five smaller shields said to represent the five Moorish kings defeated at the Battle of Ourique in 1139 — and the republican rope knot that replaced the royal crown when the monarchy fell. The designs draw from Portuguese decorative traditions: tilework patterns, maritime symbols, and the visual vocabulary of a country that once controlled a global empire and then spent a century figuring out what it was without one. The escudo died on the same day as the Greek drachma — February 28, 2002 — and the coins that carried it are the artifacts of a currency that outlasted every political system that used it.