Brazilian currency

There have been nine different units of Brazilian currency in sequence over the country's history:[1][2][3][4][5] the Portuguese and first Brazilian real (plural réis); 3 different types of cruzeiros; the cruzado; the novo cruzado; the cruzeiro real, and since 1994, the second incarnation of the Brazilian real (plural reais), with the symbol R$ and the ISO code BRL.

In 1645, the colony faced an economic crisis and, with a lack of financial support from the mainland and the need to pay for trops fighting Portuguese settlers, the local Dutch administration struck the first ever coins in Brazilian land, repurpusing gold coming from the Dutch Guinea.

[6] A few years later, in 1654, in an increasingly worse situation, coins were again minted to pay off debt, but this time with silver from the administrators' own coffers.

Before leaving Brazil in 1821, the Portuguese royal court withdrew all the bullion currency it could from banks in exchange for what would become worthless bond notes;[13][14] The following tables indicate what banknotes were present in each of the currencies of Brazil, except for the provisional issues of banknotes to exchange gold in the colonial period: No single face value has been present in all historical Brazilian banknotes.

For example, a face value of 100 is missing from the old real (as its lowest denomination of banknote is 500 Rs) and from the provisional cruzeiro novo (as its only banknotes were overstamps of the first cruzeiro, and the highest denomination was NCr$10).