Two more such coins are known of, both of which were plucked out of shipwrecks. This coin was legal tender in the United States until 1857, “which means these eight-real coins were the true first dollars” in America, according to Losada. It was sold by the auction house Daniel Frank Sedwick for €469,400 in November 2014, thus becoming the most expensive Spanish silver coin in history. The seventh spot is held by a silver eight-real coin minted in 1538 in Mexico during the reign of Queen Joanna I. A 100-ducat golf coin, made in 1528, which was gifted to King Charles I.īut not all the most valuable coins sold at auction are made of gold. Minted in Mexico in 1695, under the reign of Charles II, the buyer paid €448,000 for the eight-escudo gold piece. Thousands of them have since been found by treasure hunters who offer them to auction houses, even though legally they belong to the Spanish state because they were part of a shipment on state-owned vessels. A hurricane destroyed 11 out of the 12 ships, and more than 100,000 coins ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. On July 31, 1715, a large fleet of Spanish galleons laden with riches sank off the coast of Florida after departing from Havana on its way to Spain. who auctioned it off in 2019 for €590,000. The Spanish coin was bought for €614,250 and auctioned off again in November of that year.Īs for the third most valuable Spanish coin ever sold at auction – another 100-escudo piece made in 1633 under Philip IV – only four of them are known to exist: one is kept at Spain’s National Archaeology Museum, another one belonged to the Prince of Ligne (a Belgian lineage) who sold it in London in 1968, and a third was in the hands of a collector from Milan known only as L. The sale took place at Sotheby’s in March 2012 and raised $30 million (€26 million). When the museum found itself in dire financial straits, it was forced to sell off its 38,000-strong collection. It is an eight-escudo piece that once belonged to the collection of Archer Huntington, a 19th-century philanthropist from New York who donated it to the Hispanic Society of America. The second-most-valuable Spanish coin ever sold at auction was minted in Pamplona in 1652 during the reign of Philip IV. There are only seven other known facilities in the world with this kind of machinery. Doing so involved inserting sheets of gold “through two cylinders that were activated by a large hydraulic wheel as many times as necessary, until a sheet of the required thickness was achieved.” This thinner sheet would then pass through two other cylinders to strike both sides of the coin with the appropriate design. In his book, Losada explains that the coin purchased by the unknown Swiss collector was originally made at the Royal Mint of Segovia, the only facility with the necessary machines to craft it. An eight-escudo coin from 1652, sold at auction in 2012 for €614,000. It is ruled by the laws of supply and demand to a superlative degree,” notes the expert Jesús Losada in his book Las monedas españolas más valiosas (or, The Most Valuable Spanish Coins ), which explores the biggest global auctions to 2021 involving these sought-after objects. “A coin is worth precisely what someone is willing to pay for it at any given moment, but as an investment, it is not safe. The Spanish government, then led by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the Socialist Party (PSOE), was unable to exercise preferential acquisition rights because the coin had been “a temporary import,” meaning that it had been brought to Spain from abroad exclusively to be sold at the auction. How looted treasure helped heritage protection in Spain: The side benefits of the ‘Odyssey case’
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