1 Peso

The Banco Nacional de la República de Colombia was established in 1881 under the administration of Rafael Núñez, and its notes replaced the fractured currency output of the country's numerous private banks. This 1 Peso belongs to an early phase of that centralization — a deliberate political project as much as a monetary one, pushing back against the federalist banking arrangements of the prior decades.

Printed domestically in Bogotá rather than contracted abroad, as was common among Latin American issuers of the period, the production quality reflects the limitations of local printing infrastructure in the 1880s. That domestic origin makes this note historically distinct from the foreign-printed issues that followed later reforms.