Catalog
5 Pesos Moneda Boliviana
| Issuer | Banco de Mendoza |
|---|---|
| Year | 1871 |
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| Printer | American Bank Note Company |
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| Obverse description | The obverse is printed in black and pink on white paper, with the bank title EL BANCO DE MENDOZA in large letterpress type across the upper portion. A central vignette presents a rural pastoral scene with figures and animals in a landscape setting, flanked on the lower left by a smaller architectural or countryside vignette and on the lower right by a portrait of a woman in three-quarter view. The denomination numeral 5 appears in the upper corners, with the text CINCO PESOS in a banner below the central vignette, and manuscript date and serial number fields visible in the mid-section. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | The reverse is printed entirely in blue, with a large central guilloche medallion bearing the numeral 5 and the inscription CINCO at its center, surrounded by intricate lathe-work patterns of repeating digit 5s. Two smaller circular guilloche rosettes, each containing the numeral 5, are positioned symmetrically to the left and right of the central medallion, with fine ornamental corner devices completing the design. |
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| Comments |
Banco de Mendoza was a provincial Argentine institution operating under the short-lived free banking period of the 1860s–70s, when individual provinces still chartered their own note-issuing banks before the national government moved to consolidate monetary authority. The "Moneda Boliviana" denomination is the telling detail here — it references the Bolivian peso fuerte, a unit that circulated alongside Argentine and Chilean coinage in the Andean provinces due to cross-border trade patterns and chronic coin shortages in the interior.
ABNC handled the printing, as they did for dozens of Latin American provincial issuers during this period. Provincial Argentine notes from this era survive in small numbers; many banks folded or were absorbed within years of issue, and redemption or destruction of remaining stock was rarely documented.