10 Pesos

The Banco Nacional de la República de Colombia was established by Law 39 of 1880 as a state-owned institution with the exclusive privilege of issuing currency — a direct move by the Núñez administration to centralize monetary control away from the private regional banks that had dominated Colombian finance for decades. This note belongs to the bank's early emission period, when the American Bank Note Company supplied the printed sheets from New York and the Bogotá office completed the authorization details by hand.

By 1886 the bank's forced-currency decrees were already generating serious resistance from merchants and foreign creditors. The peso quickly depreciated, and later emissions of the same series were produced in vastly larger quantities as the government monetized its deficits — making the 1886-dated notes considerably scarcer than the run of the type suggests.