500 Pesetas Guineanas

Equatorial Guinea gained independence from Spain on 12 October 1968, and this note was issued within the first year of sovereignty — the new Banco Central operating with almost no independent monetary infrastructure and relying entirely on FNMT in Madrid, the same state printer that had produced Spanish peseta notes for decades. The irony of printing an independent nation's currency at the former colonial power's mint went largely unremarked at the time.

The peseta guineana was short-lived. A 1969 monetary reform replaced it with the ekwele in 1975, and circulated examples of this first series show heavy tropical wear — humid coastal conditions were punishing on cotton substrates that were not designed for equatorial climates.