Catalog
5 Pesos
| Issuer | Banco de Occidente, Sucursal de Guatemala |
|---|---|
| Year | 1894 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Multicolour note with a central intaglio vignette of a seated allegorical female figure resting beside bales of cotton and an industrial wheel, with a harbour and vessels in the background. To the left, the arms of the Republic of Guatemala within a circular guilloche frame; to the right, a quetzal bird perched on a branch, rendered in green intaglio. The denomination numeral "5" appears in ornate rosette panels at each corner, with the issuer title across the top and the payable clause "Pagará al portador" and "Cinco Pesos" inscribed across the lower register. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | LA SUCURSAL GUATEMALA DEL BANCO DE OCCIDENTE Quezaltenango EN QUEZALTENANGO CINCO Cinco Pesos EN MONEDA EFECTIVA Y A LA PRESENTACION Pagará al portador REPUBLICA DE GUATEMALA American Bank Note Co. New York DIRECTOR GERENTE |
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| Comments |
Banco de Occidente was a Colombian-chartered institution that operated branches across Central America in the late nineteenth century, and its Guatemala branch issues occupy an oddly peripheral corner of Central American notaphily — not quite Colombian, not quite Guatemalan in legal character. The American Bank Note Company printed the entire Sucursal de Guatemala series, a common arrangement for regional banks that lacked access to domestic security printing but needed credible, difficult-to-counterfeit paper.
By 1894, Guatemala's monetary situation was deteriorating rapidly toward the currency chaos that would culminate in the forced transition to the gold-standard quetzal decades later. Private bank notes from foreign-chartered institutions circulated alongside government paper under increasingly tenuous conditions.
P#S185 is scarce in any grade — the branch had a short active life, and surviving issued examples are considerably harder to locate than remainders.