20 Pesos

The Banco y Casa de Moneda de la Provincia de Buenos Aires was a provincial institution that predated any unified Argentine national banking system by decades. In 1856, Buenos Aires province was still operating as a de facto independent state — the Argentine Confederation and the State of Buenos Aires had formally separated after Urquiza's victory at Caseros in 1852, and the province maintained its own monetary system accordingly. This note belongs to that period of political rupture, before the Buenos Aires province rejoined the confederation following the Battle of Pavón in 1861.

PS#418 is scarce in any grade. The institutional complexity of the issuer — combining banking and mint functions under one roof — was unusual even by mid-nineteenth-century standards.