4 Reales Bolivianos

Banco de San Juan was an Argentine provincial bank operating under concession from San Juan province, and this Catamarca branch issue is among the more obscure provincial paper money circulating in the northwest interior during the brief window before the 1890s banking collapse swept most of these institutions away. Kraft was one of the few Buenos Aires printing houses capable of producing acceptable security printing at this period — a German immigrant operation that would later grow into a major commercial publisher.

The 4 reales denomination is a transitional curiosity: Bolivia's monetary system had already decimalized, but the old colonial real-based reckoning persisted in everyday commerce along the Andean trade routes well into the 1870s.