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.
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.