8 Reales - Ferdinand VI

Ferdinand VI never visited the Americas, and his coinage from Potosí reflects the administrative distance between Madrid and the Viceroyalty of Peru. The Potosí mint had a long history of fraud — most notoriously the scandal of 1649, when assayers were found to have debased silver on a massive scale for years — and the Crown's tightened oversight during Ferdinand's reign was partly a consequence of that institutional distrust still reverberating a century later.

This macuquina-style cob issue was among the last of its type; the transition to milled coinage at Potosí was completed by 1773 under Charles III.