5 Centavos

San Juan province issued its own fractional currency in 1895 because small-denomination coinage had effectively disappeared from local circulation — a chronic problem across Argentina's interior provinces in the late nineteenth century, where coin drained toward Buenos Aires and never returned. The Tesorería's solution was a series of low-denomination vales printed locally by the Compañía Sud Americana de Billetes de Banco, the Buenos Aires firm that handled much of Argentina's provincial paper during this period.

Fractional provincial issues from this era survive poorly. Daily handling of low-value notes destroys them fast, and redemption programs were rarely thorough enough to account for every piece.