Curious 'Coin' Ressembling A Spanish Colonial Cob 1/2 Escudo

I'd assume it's a "made for jewellery" replica. There's a little piece broke off the top right corner, where it might have been attached to something.

You'd need to do a test to see if it's actual gold.

Given its small size (13x14 mm) and light weight (1.65 grams), this piece likely falls outside the specifications of genuine Spanish colonial gold coinage, which tended to be heavier and more uniformly struck. While the design mimics the classic cross-and-quadrant motif seen on escudos—featuring castles and lions representing Castile and León—the execution appears stylized and possibly cast rather than struck, which is typical of jewelry replicas or commemorative pieces.

Such items are often produced in solid gold or gold-plated alloys for use in pendants, charm bracelets, or pirate-themed collectibles. The irregular shape and absence of clear mint marks or legends further suggest it was made for aesthetic appeal rather than monetary circulation. If it does test as gold, it may still hold value as a vintage jewelry item, especially if it was crafted in 14k or 18k. For confirmation, a non-invasive gold test or XRF scan would help determine its composition and rule out plated or base metal imitations.

Meant to comment on this piece a while back, Eddi. Neat little specimen.

One thing first regarding "cob 1/2 escudo" - there IS no such beast. No cob 1/2 escudos were ever made, either in Spain or in the colonies - only the 1E and up.

Additionally, there were never any gold cob 1E issues made with a pillars & waves design (as this piece imitates). Potosi never made any gold... Lima's cob 1E issues featured a simple castle punch on the obverse - only the 2E and up used the pillars style (also note that the castle punch 1E featured a cross without lions and castles... first it used dots in the cross quadrants, then kind of an X symbol).

That said, the piece is CERTAINLY clearly imitating Potosi/Lima style pillars and waves cob coins (the silver reales issues).

However, I think rather than a contemporary counterfeit made to fool people as money, this piece was likely intended as a jewelry imitation. As noted, it was mounted... also curious it was made in exact medal alignment (that was not paid attention to on cob coinage... I would guess whoever made this did it intentionally for aesthetics or OCD or ?). The bigger thing, though, is that along the lines of what I said above, there wasn't really any kind of coin of this size that this comes close to emulating.

There's also the pillars side crudeness. While the lions/castles side is actually quite detailed and a reasonable (though not exact) rendering, the pillars side is basically artistic jibberish. There are a couple characters vaguely digit-looking in the spot where the date would be, but the denomination spot has that sunburst or whatever that is. The whole thing is just not trying really hard to be perfectly imitative, even if we consider it being done in a very crude South/Central American indigenous style.

I agree it does look like a gold alloy of some sort (lower purity), and definitely has age to it.