Catalog
50 Bolivianos
| Issuer | Banco Potosí |
|---|---|
| Year | 1887 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Ornate ABNCo intaglio design with the Banco Potosí monogram at upper left, a central vignette of llamas and figures in an Andean landscape, a female allegorical figure vignette at lower left, and a portrait vignette of a uniformed military figure at right. Denomination numeral 50 appears in each corner over a pink guilloche underprint. Inscriptions read CINCUENTA BOLIVIANOS and PAGARÁ AL PORTADOR Á LA VISTA. |
|---|---|
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| Variants | P#S225a - issued note P#S225s - Specimen |
| Comments |
Banco Potosí was one of several Bolivian provincial banks authorized under the 1871 banking law, which permitted private note issuance decades before Bolivia established a central bank. The American Bank Note Company contract work here is characteristic of the period — Bolivian provincial banks almost universally turned to ABNC rather than European houses, partly for cost, partly because ABNC actively courted Latin American clients throughout the 1870s and 1880s.
Potosí's historical identity as the site of Cerro Rico — the silver mountain that funded the Spanish colonial treasury for two centuries — gives the bank's very existence a certain irony. By 1887, the silver economy that built the city was in structural decline, undercut by falling global silver prices and the shift toward gold-standard regimes elsewhere.