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100 Colones provisional overprint
| Issuer | Banco Nacional de Costa Rica |
|---|---|
| Year | 1937-1942 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Printed in blue with a red overprint, the obverse bears a central vignette of a female farmer standing in a field, her forearm supporting a basket filled with agricultural produce. The numeral 100 appears in three corners, with the upper right corner instead carrying the Roman numeral C. The overprint applies the Banco Nacional de Costa Rica authority text across the original Banco Internacional de Costa Rica legends. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Printed entirely in red, the reverse carries a ribbon panel in the upper left inscribed with the bank title. To the center left, an oval coat-of-arms vignette is set against a fine guilloche background with the numeral 100 in the foreground; to the center right, a vignette of a building with formal gardens is rendered in letterpress. The denomination CIEN COLONES and the printer's imprint appear along the lower margin. |
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| Comments |
This note belongs to a stop-gap series issued when Banco Nacional de Costa Rica needed higher denominations in circulation but lacked freshly designed and printed stock. Rather than commission a new plate, the bank applied a provisional overprint to existing notes — a common enough expedient, but one that compresses several years of monetary administration into a single piece of paper. The five-year window, 1937–1942, spans Costa Rica's cautious navigation through the tail end of the Depression and the early pressures of the Second World War on Central American trade balances.
Waterlow & Sons had a long relationship with Costa Rican note production, and the underlying sheet quality is characteristically reliable. Overprint adhesion is the thing to examine on these; uneven impression is not rare.