100 Pesos

Costa Rica's 1865 issue predates the establishment of the Banco Nacional by decades — these notes were obligations of the treasury itself, not a central bank, issued at a moment when the country had no formal banking institution capable of currency emission. The Ministerio de Hacienda y Guerra combining finance and war portfolios under one roof was not unusual for the region at the time, but it gave the notes an unusually direct relationship to state solvency rather than monetary policy.

Bradbury, Wilkinson engraved and printed for dozens of Latin American governments throughout the nineteenth century, and their work on this series is consistent with the quality they brought to comparable issues in the region. Survival rate is low — Costa Rica's tropical climate has not been kind to nineteenth-century paper.