4 Pesos Tesoro Nacional

Paraguay in 1861 was under the rule of Carlos Antonio López, who had been systematically building a state-controlled economy since the 1840s — including a government printing office capable of producing its own currency without foreign contractors. This note is a direct product of that policy. Printing domestically was a deliberate rejection of the dependency on European houses like Bradbury or Perkins Bacon that most South American governments accepted without question.

The Tesoro Nacional series circulated during an unusual moment of Paraguayan fiscal relative stability, before the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) erased roughly half the country's population and rendered most pre-war paper worthless. Survivors of this issue are genuinely uncommon.