5000 Colones Centennial of the Colon

The colón replaced the peso in 1897 under President Rafael Yglesias Castro, pegged at two colones to the U.S. dollar as part of a deliberate alignment with gold-standard orthodoxy then sweeping Latin America. The centennial issue in 1997 arrived during a period when Costa Rica's currency had long since abandoned any fixed peg, with the colón subject to a crawling-band exchange regime that eroded its value continuously against the dollar it once matched at par.