Spanish treasure coins, the 1715 Fleet, and Florida's Treasure Coast

A reference, not a shop

Most of what ranks online for these coins is written by people selling them. A dealer blog is a fine place to buy a coin, but it is a poor place to learn what your coin is worth, because the writer has a reason to quote the high number. This site sells nothing. It exists to answer the questions a first-time owner actually asks: what is this, is it real, and what is the honest range of value.

The coins at the center of the story are Spanish colonial silver and gold, struck across the Americas from the 1500s to the early 1800s. The silver 8 reales, the famous piece of eight, was the dollar of its day and the model Congress chose for the US dollar in 1792. The gold escudos gave us the doubloon. Between about 1572 and 1773 many were made as cobs: rough, hand-struck lumps of precise weight and uneven shape. Our Spanish colonial coins hub lays out the whole system, and the piece of eight and doubloon pages go deep on the two coins most people come looking for.

Florida is where a lot of this treasure ends up on a beach. On 31 July 1715, a hurricane sank eleven ships of a Spanish fleet along the coast between Sebastian and Fort Pierce, and coins from those wrecks still wash ashore after storms. That stretch of Atlantic shoreline earned the name the Treasure Coast. If you have found something and are not sure what to do, our guide to finding a coin on a Florida beach walks through the first steps, including why you should not clean it and where Florida law comes in.

Two things set the tools here apart from the dealer pages. The first is identification: a plain table that turns the marks on a coin, the mint stamp, the assayer initial, the denomination, and the date, into a name for what you are holding. The second is value: a table of ranges rather than a single confident price, with a clear note on why a sea-salvaged coin with a certificate sells for many times what the same coin fetches raw and ungraded. Ranges are honest. A single number, from someone who wants to sell you a coin or buy yours, rarely is.

Every fact on this site traces to a source, and each page lists the ones it leans on, from the standard references on the Spanish dollar to the salvage records of the 1715 Fleet. Where a figure comes from a dealer catalogue, we say so and treat it as an asking price, not gospel. Where the law is involved, as with beach finds, we point you to the Florida Division of Historical Resources rather than pretend to give legal advice. New here? Read what a piece of eight is, then learn how to identify a Spanish colonial coin.