500 Córdobas

Nicaragua's central bank leaned heavily on the Canadian Bank Note Company throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s — a period when the córdoba was still recovering credibility after the catastrophic hyperinflation of the late 1980s, when prices rose by tens of thousands of percent annually and earlier denominations became worthless within months. By 2002, the currency had been restabilized through a crawling-peg exchange rate regime anchored to the US dollar, and high-denomination notes like this 500 were finally circulating in an economy where they could hold meaningful value.

The watermark is the sole listed security feature — modest for a note of this face value.