1 Peso Fuerte

Banco de San Juan operated as one of Argentina's provincial banks during the mid-nineteenth century, authorized to issue notes through branch offices in other provinces. A Tucumán branch issuing San Juan paper is itself an artifact of Argentina's fragmented pre-national banking period, when no central authority controlled note issuance and a note from one province circulating in another was a matter of commercial necessity rather than policy.

The "Peso Fuerte" denomination distinguished hard-currency-backed paper from the inflated "Peso Moneda Corriente" notes that plagued Argentine commerce throughout this period — a distinction that mattered enormously to merchants and meant little to most laborers paid in whatever paper was at hand.