10 Pesos

Banco Nacional was one of several private banks of issue operating in Colombia during the late nineteenth century under government concession — not to be confused with the state-owned Banco Nacional de Colombia, which had its own turbulent history of forced-currency legislation in the 1880s and 1890s. The distinction matters for attribution, and catalog confusion between the two is not uncommon.

By 1899, Colombia was months away from the War of the Thousand Days, the devastating civil conflict that would run until 1902 and trigger a catastrophic hyperinflationary episode. Notes issued in this period had almost no stable economic environment to circulate in.