On July 22, Peru’s first two denominations of its new bank notes were released: the 10- and 100-sol. The 20- and 50 -sol notes will be available in the next few months. A 200-sol note will follow in the coming year. One sol equals 25 cents in United States dollars.
The series will be dedicated by the Central Bank of Peru to 20th-century Peruvians in the arts, sciences, and the diverse flora & fauna. For the first time, all the back sides of the book will be published in vertical format.
De La Rue is printing the series. He won a competition that saw all of the major bank note printers around the globe participate.
Maria Isabel Granda y Larco (also known as Chabuca Granda) is the subject of this 10-sol note. She was an internationally acclaimed singer/songwriter, who wrote over 100 songs that were based on Peruvian folklore and history. “La Flor de la Canela,” her song, has been an unofficial anthem of Lima. In 1983, she died in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at the age 63. She had many unfinished projects. In 2017, her work was designated a Cultural Heritage of the Nation. In 2019, the Peruvian government awarded her the Order of the Sun of Peru posthumously, the highest honor in Peru.
As a symbol for the country’s animal riches, it has a picture of a vicuna on its back. It also features a Flor de Amancaes (amancay), which Chabuca uses in his song “Jose Antonio.” This amancay is a native of Peru. It blooms in the hills along the coast, near Lima, once a year.
The bank dedicates the 100-sol note to Pedro Paulet. He is a multidisciplinary sage, an engineer, mechanic, chemist and economist, as well as a sculptor, writer, lecturer and visionary inventor. He was born 1874. As a child, he became interested in space travel after reading Jules Verne’s From Earth to the Moon. He was 19 when he received a scholarship from the government to study engineering at the Sorbonne.
Although he claimed to have invented the first liquid-fueled rocket engines in 1890s, there were no witnesses. According to the bank’s biography, he was the inventor of modern rocket propulsion systems in 1900. In 1974, Peru issued an 800-sol airmail stamp that called him “the father in astronautics.” He was buried in Buenos Aires in Argentina in 1945.
The back features a spatula columbian hummingbird, which is a native species and lives in the forest edges and scrubland of the northern Andes. It also contains a Phragmipedium Kovachii orchid that is native to the Andean cloud forests, northern Peru. It is one of the most beautiful flowers on the planet.
Both notes have windowed security threads that can be used to display moving images, colors, color-changing paint, or other moving images.
