10 Colones

The Banco Internacional de Costa Rica was established by the government in 1914 as a state-controlled institution intended to break the effective monopoly that private banks — chiefly the Banco de Costa Rica — had long held over currency issuance. This note belongs to the early years of that bank's consolidation of that role, a period when ABNC-printed issues were the norm for Central American government banking precisely because domestic printing infrastructure was nonexistent.

ABNC produced several closely related series for Costa Rica during the 1920s, and plate reuse across denominations is worth checking — the border and lathe-work elements on some issues within P#183–P#190 share tooling.