Watch List notes:

Medellin, Colombia, gold 5 pesos, 1885/74, fineness 0.666/0.900, very rare, NGC MS 63+, finest known in NGC census.Restrepo-330; Sed-38; KM-163.As close to pristine as this type comes, with choice details and no marks or wear, just a few very slightly crude spots on rims (as made), non-lustrous and granular surfaces in dull color from low fineness, clear overdate and 6/9 in fineness, die-cracks in reverse legends, from a three-coin issue (2, 5 and 10 pesos of 1885-6) that barely survived, best explained by Dr. Frank Sedwick in his book The Gold Coinage of Gran Colombia (1991): "In the long interval between 1878 and 1913, Colombia issued no gold coins except these three matching pieces, all recut from earlier dies. No record indicates how many of these coins were minted, but the issue must have been very small. This, however, is probably not the main reason for their rarity. It was their unacceptably low gold content, the only 16-karat gold coins ever issued by any Colombian government, that destined them to the melting pots. The survival of any of these .666 pieces is a miracle, for they were coins that nobody wanted, and were issued at a time when serious collectors of Colombian coins hardly existed." Curiously, NGC lists a couple 1885 entries without the 85/74 overdate, which we suspect are erroneous, but neither of those approaches the grade level of this finest-known piece, which dominates above two other straight-grade XF 40's in the census as well as Dr. Sedwick's XF details example for the properly attributed 1885/74 overdate.
($10000-15000)