5 Bolivianos Banco Nacional de Bolivia

The Banco Nacional de Bolivia was founded in 1871, just two years before this note was issued, making it one of the earliest emissions from what was then Bolivia's first formally chartered commercial bank. The American Bank Note Company in New York supplied the printing for much of the bank's early paper, a common arrangement for South American institutions of the period that lacked domestic intaglio capacity.

Bolivia still controlled its Pacific coastal territory in 1873 — the War of the Pacific was still six years away. The loss of that territory to Chile in 1879 would eventually destabilize the country's banking system, but the Banco Nacional survived longer than most of its competitors before the nationalization wave of the early twentieth century.