DescriptionThe Portuguese made special coins for the Azores starting in the 18th century. Those coins only occasionally bore the name of the islands.There may or may not have been human inhabitants before the arrival of the Portuguese in the late 14th or early 15th century, exact date uncertain. Settlers grew sheep. From then on it has been attached to mainland Portugal, currently as an “autonomous region,” meaning it gets to make its own decisions on anything the central government doesn’t care about.It has been habitual, on the collecting side of numismatics, for “Africa” to exclude the Mediterranean coastal states, which are typically lumped in with the other Arab states in the category “Middle East.” Generally speaking, there was a colonial period and an independent period.By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.
