Helvetic Mints stylish Swiss Wildlife series welcomes its fifth silver coin with the Golden Eagle

One of the pioneers of ultra high relief (UHR) coin strikes and a company still pushing boundaries today, the Helvetic Mint has been producing this type of coin for many years now and one of its most popular UHR series has recieved its fifth entrant. Called Swiss Wildlife, this one-ounce fine silver coin series first appeared in 2014 with a pair of coins featuring the Ibex and the Capercaillie. The following year saw the Red Deer and the Mountain Hare added and while there wasn’t a release last year, the 2016 coin has finally appeared.

Depicting the magnificent Golden Eagle, the same artistic style has been used to create another fine coin. With designs crafted in a more traditional way, sculpted in plaster rather than CAD, they have a very organic, natural look. This is enhanced by eschewing a coin rim and keeping this face completely free of any inscriptions. The end result is three-dimensional piece of metal art that is almost recognisably Helvetic Mint

The obverse features exactly what you’d expect from a Niue Island issued coin – an effigy of Queen Elizabeth II (by Raphael Maklouf for a change) surrounded by all the usual inscriptions. The coin comes supplied in one of the clever latex-skinned ‘floating frames’ as pioneered by Prinz with their Nimbus range. They’re a cool way to show a coin like this.

Selling for around the €75 mark, the coin is available to order now and should ship in the next few weeks. A fine collection, we’ll hopefully get a guide up to the range sometime over the weekend.