1 Peso

Venezuela's 1811 patriot government issued this note under extraordinary pressure — the First Republic was less than a year old, fighting both royalist forces and the catastrophic Caracas earthquake of March 1812 that would soon be exploited by the Church as divine punishment for rebellion. Paper money was deeply mistrusted by a population accustomed to Spanish colonial coinage, and these early republican emissions were backed by nothing more durable than political will.

Printed locally rather than abroad, production quality was rudimentary. The First Republic collapsed by July 1812, and most of this emission would have been repudiated, destroyed, or simply abandoned — which accounts for extreme scarcity today.