You may have already seen the EMU coin series for the European Union countries. In Spain, we have had a very popular variant. In the images, you can see that the stars on the right are quite bigger. As far as I know, there is still no official information about mintage quantity or the reason about this. It is not just an error or manipulation, as it seems they have been issued some thousands. They say it could have been some mistaken coin die. If this is true, the mintage should be less than 70,000 coins, but I'm just guessing on this.
http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/the_euro/coins13611_en.htm "The design, which symbolizes the euro as the latest step in the long history of European economic integration" "The centre of the coin shows a stylised human figure whose left arm is prolonged by the euro symbol."
It is possible that they were produced at two different mints, so far I have managed not to buy a single one of them LOL (I suppose I will have to at some stage)
Apparently most did not care about the coin, or the designs. Well, that is how such votes work - the European Union has a population of almost 500 million, but only 150,000 participated in this design vote. By the way, Mr Stamatopoulos (the winning artist) also designed the Greek circulation coins. But what looks good on the €1 coin from Greece (the "coin on a coin" look) is ho-hum in this case ... Oh well, the vote was a fairly long time ago (Jan-Feb 2008), and the coins were issued in January 2009. I had almost forgotten about them. Christian
Don't think the Spanish ones were made at more than one place. What is more likely (izotz may know more about this) is that the type with the bigger stars was produced and issued first, and then the dies were modified. Christian
Right now, as you said, there is just one mint in Spain (Madrid). As I said, no official answer for this yet. But it is quite likely that they changed the die. I suppose they changed their minds about stars, but they didn't realize that one of the dies was taken from the mistaken design.
Right now I got this coin coming from Spain but I don't know which variety I'm going to get . I'm still a bit confused. Which one is the rarer variety, big stars or small stars?
"Big stars" is the rare one. It is quite likely that you will receive the small ones. Anyway, you may be lucky
But the Greek circulation euros are so beautiful! Why couldn´t he do a better job designing this coin? I´m sure he had lazy day, and handed the job to his daughter dd:
