Catalog
1 Lempira
| Issuer | Banco de Honduras |
|---|---|
| Year | 1932 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Blue on multicolour underprint. Portrait vignette of Cacique Lempira at left, with the Honduran coat of arms at right. The design is framed by fine guilloche scrollwork with denomination and issuer inscriptions distributed across the face. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Printed entirely in blue, the reverse centres on an intaglio vignette of the Banco de Honduras building, rendered in fine detail with arched windows, a colonnaded façade, and trees at right against a mountainous backdrop. The central vignette is flanked on each side by large rosette guilloche medallions bearing the numeral "1", with the bank name inscribed in a decorative cartouche above and the denomination "UN LEMPIRA" in bold lettering below. The printer's imprint "Waterlow & Sons Limited, Londres, Inglaterra" appears at the bottom margin. |
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| Comments |
Banco de Honduras issued this note just as the country was being squeezed between collapsing banana revenues and the broader collapse of commodity prices after 1929. The Lempira had only been introduced as Honduras's national currency in 1931, replacing the Peso, so this 1932 printing came within the currency's first full year of circulation — Waterlow & Sons in London producing the plates before any domestic infrastructure existed to do the work.
Waterlow's contract with Honduran authorities during this period was part of a broader Latin American portfolio the firm managed through the interwar years. The note takes its name from the 16th-century Lenca chieftain who led resistance against Spanish conquest — one of the few cases where a currency denomination and its unit name carry genuine indigenous political weight rather than colonial nomenclature.