10 Centavos

The Banco Nacional del Perú was a short-lived institution, chartered in 1872 with backing from a consortium of Lima merchants and operating for only a handful of years before Peru's fiscal catastrophe — the War of the Pacific and the collapse of guano revenues — swept away most of the country's private banking infrastructure. This 10 centavos note is among the lowest denominations the bank issued, intended to address the chronic shortage of fractional currency that plagued everyday commerce throughout the Andean republics in this period.

ABNC produced the plates in New York, as was standard for Lima's better-capitalized banks in the 1870s, who found domestic printing options inadequate for security purposes. The series is genuinely scarce in any grade — the bank's brief operational window and subsequent dissolution left little in the way of surviving paper.