Catalog
50 Dollars - Elizabeth II
| Issuer | Central Bank of Belize |
|---|---|
| Year | 1990-1991 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | 50 Dollars |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Violet intaglio print over multicolour guilloche underprint with red serial numbers. A front-facing portrait of Queen Elizabeth II wearing the Vladimir Tiara occupies the centre right, flanked at left by a vignette of a man on a boat before the Belize City Swing Bridge; at centre, queen triggerfish (Balistes vetula) and queen angelfish (Holacanthus ciliaris) appear within the underprint. The Coat of Arms of Belize with a silver fish faces left at lower left, a jade head vignette appears at upper left, and a see-through register element in the form of bridge ironwork is positioned at lower right. |
|---|---|
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| Protection type | Watermark |
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| Comments |
Belize's currency history is short — the country only gained independence from Britain in 1981, and the Central Bank wasn't established until 1982. By 1990, when this note entered circulation, the Belize dollar had been pegged at a fixed rate of 2:1 to the US dollar since 1978, a peg that has held without interruption to the present day. That unusual monetary stability meant there was little urgency to redesign or reissue high-denomination notes, which partly explains the relatively narrow 1990–1991 production window for this particular P#56 series.
De La Rue's involvement here is unsurprising — they printed Belizean notes continuously through this period — but the $50 denomination saw far less commercial use than lower values in a country where daily transactions rarely demanded it.