20 Pesos Fuertes

Banco de San Juan was one of the provincial banks chartered under Argentina's 1854 banking legislation, which briefly allowed individual provinces to establish note-issuing institutions before federal consolidation eventually curtailed those privileges. The Tucumán branch designation on this note is the detail worth pausing on — San Juan and Tucumán are not adjacent provinces, and a San Juan bank operating a note-issuing branch in Tucumán reflects the commercially ambitious, often chaotic character of Argentine provincial banking in the 1850s and 1860s.

The "Fuertes" denomination distinguishes these notes from the heavily depreciated moneda corriente then circulating in Buenos Aires — a deliberate signal of hard-money credibility that provincial issuers used to attract depositors and merchants.