2500 Réis

The Banco Nacional Ultramarino held a unique position in Portuguese colonial finance — chartered in Lisbon but operating as the note-issuing authority across multiple overseas territories simultaneously, including Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, and Portuguese India. A single plate design from Bradbury Wilkinson could therefore circulate under different overprints or countermarks across wholly separate colonial economies, which complicates provenance research on this series considerably.

Pick 30 is among the scarcer BNU issues of the period. The 1909 date places it at the tail end of the constitutional monarchy, two years before the revolution that abolished the House of Braganza and restructured colonial banking oversight entirely.