10 Colones

The Banco Internacional de Costa Rica was established by government decree in 1914, created in part to consolidate and regulate a fractured note-issuing system that had allowed private banks considerable autonomy. This note belongs to the earliest emissions of that institution — printed by the American Bank Note Company, whose intaglio work for Latin American central banks in this period was technically superior to anything available domestically.

The ABNC contract relationship with Costa Rica ran for decades. Early series like this one used hand-dated and hand-signed authorization fields, making two examples with identical signatures uncommon.