50 Bolívares

The Banco de Maracaibo was a regional commercial bank, not a national institution, and its authority to issue currency reflected Venezuela's fractured 19th-century banking framework — federal law permitted state-chartered banks to circulate their own notes well into the 1880s. ABNC handled the plates, as they did for dozens of Latin American issuers in this period, but the notes circulated in a port economy heavily dependent on coffee and cacao exports moving through Lake Maracaibo.

Surviving examples from this 1885 series are uncommon. Maracaibo's humid climate was punishing on paper, and regional Venezuelan private bank notes of this vintage were rarely preserved systematically.