El Salvador’s paper history is a ledger of shifts in what counts as money. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bank issues and early state notes ran alongside coffee-backed credit, with printing houses carrying Latin American design language—guilloches, classic counters, portrait medallions—into San Salvador’s finance. The colón (introduced 1892) framed prices for a century while remittances from abroad grew into a structural source of foreign exchange and household liquidity.
In 2001 the country dollarized: colón notes gave way to the U.S. dollar, trading autonomy in monetary policy for lower inflation, deeper integration with dollar flows and clearer pricing for trade. Two decades later, the 2021 Bitcoin law layered a digital legal tender alongside cash dollars, a live test of payments, reserves and volatility management in a small open economy. Taken together, these transitions make Salvadoran paper (and its absence) a compact study in how policy choices, external accounts and trust move through design, denominations and use. Use the filters above to pivot by type or year as this section grows.
Attribution and dating: although the circulation notes date to 1997–1999, this proof is correctly dated 1996 as part of the pre-issue approval cycle. It maps directly to the issued Pick 149/155 design family. Read more →
Catalogued as Pick 149a. This is the first year of the 25 Colones family whose design lineage derives from the 1996 master die proof. Early print runs are valued for their fresh plates and bold intaglio depth. Read more →
Official specimen of the 1997 25 Colones issue printed by De La Rue, catalogued as Pick 149as. Features red diagonal SPECIMEN overprint, oval control stamps, and circular perforation cancels. Read more →
Graded PMG 66 EPQ Gem Uncirculated, this example represents top quality for the type and is an excellent pairing with the 1997 Pick 149a issue and its corresponding specimen 149as. Read more →
Printed by De La Rue on enhanced security paper featuring an embedded metallic thread, latent image devices, and complex guilloché. The design continues the 'Pirámide de San Andrés' motif with subtle updates: a deeper lower border hue, refined microtext, and newly engraved official signatures. Read more →
This specimen represents the terminal proof stage of the 25 Colones before the introduction of the U.S. dollar in 2001. It retains all key security features-watermark, metallic thread, and color-shifting inks-while being clearly marked to prevent circulation. Distributed in small numbers to institutional archives and printer files. Read more →