100 Colones

The Banco Internacional de Costa Rica was not a central bank in the modern sense — it was a state-owned commercial institution that held the government account and acted as the de facto monetary authority before the Banco Central de Costa Rica was established in 1950. Notes of this series circulated across a period that included the severe commodity price collapse following World War One, which hit coffee-dependent Costa Rica hard and drove significant monetary instability through the early 1920s.

ABNC produced the plates in New York to their standard intaglio quality for Latin American clients of this period. The guilloche work is machine-generated and consistent with their output for multiple regional issuers simultaneously — Costa Rica was one of several Central American governments contracting the same New York security printers within the same decade.

High-denomination notes of this issuer in circulated grades frequently show stress folds along the vertical center, a known characteristic of notes folded for pocket or till storage over extended use.