200 Reales de Vellón Banco de Málaga

The Banco de Málaga was one of a clutch of provincial Spanish issuing banks chartered under the 1856 banking law, which briefly allowed regional banks to circulate their own notes. The experiment was short-lived — the Banco de España absorbed most of them by 1874, and the Málaga bank's notes were retired along with the rest. Very few provincial issues from this period survive in any quantity, partly because redemption was aggressive and partly because Andalusian commercial circulation was hard on paper.

Perkins, Bacon & Petch brought their steel intaglio engraving to this series, the same security printing technology they applied to postage stamps across the British Empire. The choice of a London firm for a southern Spanish provincial bank was entirely unremarkable by 1860 — Madrid and Barcelona banks were doing the same.