5 Centesimos de Real

Uruguay's earliest copper coinage was struck not in Montevideo but in Europe — this issue came from the Paris Mint, as the young republic lacked domestic minting infrastructure. The 1855 date places it squarely in the chaotic decade following independence consolidation, when the country was still rebuilding after the Guerra Grande, a devastating nine-year siege of Montevideo that had ended only in 1851 and left the national economy in ruins.

The centésimo system itself was newly adopted, replacing the older real-based accounting that this coin's denomination awkwardly straddles — five centésimos de real, a transitional unit that would be phased out within a generation.