50 Centavos

The Banco de Cartagena was one of several private commercial banks licensed under Colombia's 1871 banking law, which allowed state-chartered institutions to issue their own notes — a decentralized arrangement that persisted until the Banco de la República absorbed these privileges in the early twentieth century. Small-denomination fractional notes like this 50 Centavos were typically produced locally rather than sent abroad to established security printers, which accounts for the Cartagena imprint and for the comparatively modest production quality seen across the series.

Surviving examples are genuinely rare; low-denomination circulating paper from provincial Colombian banks of this period was used hard and seldom preserved.