Gabriel García Márquez’s Face Graces Colombia’s New 50,000 Peso Bill

September 12, 2016

Banknote with Marquez' image on it

Colombia began circulating a new 50,000 peso bill last week that features the late Nobel Prize–winning Gabriel García Márquez, who died of pneumonia in 2014, Quartz reports. The note (roughly $17.43 USD) is the second-highest bill issued by the Colombian central bank.

The magical realist author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera joins two members of the Arawak tribe, natives of Colombia, and La Ciudad Perdida, a ruin in the Sierra Nevada, on the bill. Beside the image of the author is, aptly, a cluster of butterflies—a reference to Mauricio Babilonia, a character in One Hundred Years who is always surrounded by yellow butterflies.

The bill also includes fifty anti-counterfeiting design features, including a microtext quotation from Márquez’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Central bank governor José Darío Uribe said in an August 19 speech that the quotation describes “a new and sweeping utopia of life.”

“This message today, if anything, is more urgent than when uttered for the first time [in] Stockholm in 1982,” Uribe said.

Márquez is among the few literary figures featured on a bill, joining Hans Christian Andersen (on the 10 Danish kroner, 1952–1975), Charles Dickens (on the UK £10, 1992–2003), James Joyce (on the Irish £10, 1993–1999), and Ichiy? Higuchi (a ¥5,000 bill currently in circulation). In 2017, Jane Austen will grace the British ten-pound note.

 

Image credit: Banco Central de Colombia.

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