5 Pesos

The Banco Nacional de las Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata was the second major banking institution of post-independence Argentina, chartered in 1826 partly to finance the costly war with Brazil over the Banda Oriental. It lasted barely a decade. A catastrophic run on deposits, mounting government debt, and convertibility failures forced its liquidation in 1836, making any surviving note from its final years of operation genuinely rare by circumstance rather than by collector fashion.

Printed locally in Buenos Aires rather than sent abroad to London or Paris as many contemporary South American issues were — a detail that shows in the cruder typography relative to, say, Chilean or Peruvian contemporaries of the same period.