About this product

Product Information

This 1924 silver Peru Sol can be a beautiful coin. Peru is famous as a place where people travel to see the capital city of Lima or the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu, but the Peru Sol can deserve to be a prized piece for collectors of coins from South America. In 1924, when this Peruvian sol coin was minted, soles were always made of silver, and the value of the Peru sol was nearly equivalent to that of the U.S. dollar. The obverse of the coin shows Liberty and the inscription “FIRME Y FELIZ POR LA UNION” around the edges and “UN SOL” at the bottom. The reverse of this unit of currency bears images of a cornucopia, a llama, and several types of plants. The mintage of the 1924 Peru sol was 96,000 and the mintage of the silver sol varied greatly from one year to another. The sol was the Peruvian unit of currency from the 1863 until 1985, but the Peruvian government introduced the Nuevo Sol (PEN) in 1991, and PEN remains the unit of Peruvian currency. Peru’s money system in the early twentieth century consisted of many different types of coins, related to different types of foreign currency and to each other in complex ways. The need to standardize the system in which gold, silver, and copper currencies counted in soles and escudo, peso, and peseta units, as well as the need to control inflation, led to the introduction of the PEN and the Centimo, worth one hundredth of a PEN, at the end of the twentieth century. The sol takes its name from solidus, a unit of currency used in ancient Rome, and it is by coincidence that its name is the same as the Spanish word for “sun.” The sun theme has been featured in almost every unit of currency in Peru’s history, and it is simply a happy turn of events that the Peruvian sol is indirectly named after the sun. This Peru sol can be a valuable asset to any collection of currency items from Latin America. It can be an essential item to keep alongside Nuevo Sol and peso coins that show the rich history of Peru through its money, from the oldest Spanish colonial currency to the modern PEN. It can represent a moment in Peru’s history when its currency was still tied to the gold standard and pure silver currency was still widely in circulation.