The Chilean Peso has a somewhat more exciting history than our dollars and pounds. For starters, it didn’t even exist until 1975, when it was introduced to replace a highly devalued Escudo. Just in the last 10 or 15 years we expats have gotten to witness all kinds of neat changes, such as the pink plastic 2.000-peso bill, the replacement of the 500-peso bill with a coin, and the two-tone 100-peso coin. This last one was an unfortunate turn of events for Chile’s urban children, since for some reason most, if not all, of those supermarket vending machines full of cheap toys only accept the old 100-peso coin. (I often tell my son that I have none of those coins on me, and most the time it’s true.)
Read more about the Chilean Peso on Wikipedia.
Change is good
Change, that is, coins and 1.000- and 2.000-peso bills, are worth more than their proportional value compared to higher-denominated bills. For some reason there aren’t enough of them around, and people do not spend them wantonly. If you go into a store to buy an item for $1.500 and hand the cashier a $10.000 bill, he will automatically ask you, “No tiene más sencillo?” regardless of how many 1′s and 2′s he actually has in the cash register. I actually had a cab driver once accuse me of taking a ride in his taxi just to break a 10. And forget about $20.000-peso bills (if you’ve ever actually seen one). I avoid ATMs that dole them out. Tip: if you’re in a bind, a good place to break large bills is the supermarket, the bigger the better.
Gambando y quinando
Ever wonder where the U.S.-coin nicknames penny, nickel and dime come from? Me neither. But it’s helpful to know their equivalents in Chile.
- Gamba – 100 pesos
- Quina – 500 pesos
- Luca, lucrecia – 1 thousand pesos
- Gabriela – 5 thousand pesos
- Arturo – 10 thousand pesos
- Palo – 1 million pesos
I can’t give you unequivocal etymologies for these terms, but it’s pretty clear that “Gabriela” and “Arturo” refer to the the historical figures depicted on those bills, Gabriela Mistral and Arturo Prat. Gamba means “prawn” in Chile, and palo means “stick”, so you’ll have to get creative with those.
Luca is the one of these you really need to know. It can be used generically to mean “money,” as in Al proyecto le faltan lucas. And it’s used in multiples to refer to other bills and quantities of money. You will probably hear un billete de cinco lucas more often than una Gabriela in reference to a 5.000-peso note.