2 Reales

The Banco Hipotecario de Tucumán was one of the earliest provincial banking experiments in Argentina, operating during a period when Buenos Aires held a near-monopoly on financial infrastructure and the interior provinces were improvising. A 2 Reales denomination in 1841 places this note firmly in the era of fractional paper — issued to address the chronic shortage of small metallic currency in the northwest, where silver coinage drained toward Bolivia and Chile through trade.

Printed locally in Tucumán rather than dispatched to a European house, production quality was necessarily rudimentary. Provincial press work of this type typically shows inconsistent ink distribution and hand-completed date and serial fields.