1 peso

The Banco Nacional de los Estados Unidos de Colombia was established by law in 1880 as the country's first government-owned bank, with a mandate to issue a unified national currency and displace the chaotic proliferation of private bank notes that had dominated Colombian commerce for decades. This 1 peso note belongs to the bank's earliest issue, printed by ABNC in New York before domestic printing infrastructure existed.

The federal structure implied by "Estados Unidos de Colombia" — the name adopted under the 1863 Rionegro Constitution — was already politically contested by the time these notes circulated. The centralist 1886 constitution abolished that arrangement entirely, and the bank itself was liquidated in 1894 amid the monetary instability that preceded the Thousand Days War.