250 Pesetas

Issue 1878: This issue, composed of completely different banknotes, both on the obverse and reverse, was intended for general circulation, although they were domiciled, if necessary, in the Branches by means of stamps stamped in grease ink on both sides of the banknote to continue Article 7 of the Decree-Law of March 19, 1874 is in force. Although in some publications, including foreign ones, reference has been made to a supposed 125 peseta bill, in reality it has never existed. The fact that the heading "125 Peseta banknotes" appears in some balance sheets of the Bank of Spain is due to the fact that the old 500 reales and 50 escudos banknotes, still in circulation, were recorded at their value in pesetas.

The 1856 law on banknotes authorised the circulation of banknotes, changing the minimum value from the 500 Reales that had been approved on previous occasions to 100 Reales, while maintaining the traditional value of 4,000 Reales as the upper limit. When the Peseta was established as the official currency and the Bank of Spain saw fit to issue in this currency (which was not immediate), the denominations of the banknotes underwent a transformation due to the equivalences between Reales and Pesetas. The first issue in pesetas was in 1874, which was not put into circulation until the following year. From that series onwards, the classic values ​​of 25, 50, 100, 500 and 1,000 pesetas were adopted, the result of the equivalence of the values ​​in reales of many banknotes, but not all of them. The 500 Reales note was transformed into the 100 Pesetas note, of a slightly lower value, and the equivalent of the 1,000 reales note ceased to exist.
This was the case, in general terms, in all the issues except for the 1878 series, whose series, like the 1880 series, would not have the lower value of 25 pesetas. But in the 1878 issue, an additional decision was made that resulted in a strange note: to give the 1,000 Reales equivalent with a 250 Pesetas note (single denomination in all Spanish banknotes), an atypical value, but one that made some sense with a decimal sequence of notes that began with 25. The Bank had received two orders from abroad (1875 to the United Kingdom and 1876 to the United States) and perhaps they wanted to give a touch of originality to their product. It is possible, given the quantities printed, that this note was produced in an attempt to compensate for a lower circulation of high-denomination notes, which were rarely used in the 19th century, or as a precaution to avoid having to put them into circulation for a while. In any case, this 250-Peseta note from 1878 was put into the hands of the public in 1880 and coexisted with many others from previous and later issues during its short life.

Fernando de Herrera (~1534–1597), called "El Divino", was a 16th-century Spanish poet and man of letters. He was born in Seville. Much of what is known about him comes from Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos de illustres y memorables varones (Book of the Description of the True Portraits of Illustrious and Memorable Men) (1599) by Francisco Pacheco.