Portuguese Guin‚ Coins

Those are very interesting! Just look at those wide rims! I had never heard of Guin before.

G'day,
quote: "I had never heard of Guin before."
- nor had I. Nor had the Portuguese. ElleKitty mispelled "Guine" to see who was paying attention: you passed the test.

so, I looked it up: "Portuguese Guinea was the name for what is today Guinea-Bissau from 1446 to September 10, 1974."

Peter in Oz

Snowman, these coins came from my local shop. For some reason, probably the fact that all but one of the workers at the shop feel world coins are inferior to US coins, these were located at the bottom of the Bargain Bin. I bought a pound of coins for $6 bucks. If you've got a current Krause, I'd love to know what these coins are going for today. My book is a few years out of date. I have six of the 5 centavo coins that are in the same condition although there are a few spots darkening on them. I'll likely be putting one in the Auction area a little later.

Peter Thomas, I infact simply spelled it in Portuguese. ;) It's spelled that way on the coin. But yes, it is a smallish country on the west central coast of Africa, now known as Guinea-Bissau. Not to be confused with New Guinea in the Pacific, nor Guiana Frances in South America... :D

Sap, darnit, now you've issued a challenge. :( I really can't afford to go out and find Guinea-Bissau coins... although ebay has some FAO issues from 1977 that don't look too bad. Question is, are they the ones you're mentioning?

That's the ones. I assume they actually circulated, 'cause Krause gives values for them in grades down to Fine.

I had to resort to ebay for mine, too, back in 2005; I bought the set of 5. I've sure never seen one in a coin shop or show.

I think she typed in the "e with accent" at the end, but the forum software rejected it. Snitz tends to dislike accented letters, Greek, Cyrillic, or anything but some of the basic ASCII symbols. £, ¢ and ½ are fine, but accented e (e) becomes invisible. If it's like other funky symbols I've tried to use here, it lets you type it, and it shows up on preview, but disappears when you hit submit.

Edit: Well, so much for that theory. The e turns up fine in text. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't like funky characters in thread titles.

Edit II: Nope, even the funkiest characters, like the euro symbol, turn up in thread titles now. I just tested it. The forum must've had an upgrade since I last tried to use them. Looks like it's Elle's fault after all.

I've been to Guinea Bissua perhaps 6 or seven times - all in the period 1996 - 2002. Very, very small country. The capital, called Bissau, could best be described as a hamlet. Very low population too.

Yes, they used paper money exclusively. I never saw a coin. The problem was that the denominations were so low that you had to have a paper bag of money just to go out and buy lunch - I'm not kidding.

That part of Africa is a very strange slice of the world - with countries like Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The only ones in the area who were not former French colonies and each of which had their own currencies as opposed to the West African CFA. By the Way, they now use the West African CFA - I think this started in about 2000 or 2001.

I think I have a couple notes from there. I'll see if I can's scan them in.

Believe it or not I already have the set. I even have a duplicate 5 Pesos kicking around in my office somewhere.