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| Honduras banknotes 10 Honduran Lempiras banknote |
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| 10 Honduran Lempiras banknote |
Honduran Lempira, Billetes de Honduras, Honduras banknotes, Honduras paper money, papel moneda en Honduras, Billete de Lempiras, Honduras bank notes, Honduran banknotes, Honduran paper money, Honduran bank notes, Honduras Currency money, Lempira Hondureño.
Obverse: Legendary Indian Chief and Warrior Lempira. His name means "Lord of the Mountains" or "Lord of the Sierra." Lempira is the first national hero of Honduras.
Reverse: Banco de Honduras building in Tegucigalpa.
Printed by Waterlow and Sons Limited, London England.
Legendary Indian Chief and Warrior Lempira was a war chieftain of the Lencas of western Honduras in Central America during the 1530s, when he led resistance to Francisco de Montejo's attempts to conquer and incorporate the region into the province of Honduras.
Lempira was the ruler of Coquin, a city now known as Gracias and established as the capital of the Lempira region in Honduras. This region is the historical highland of the Lenca people, who are celebrated as the indigenous group who fought the hardest against Spanish conquest.
When the Spaniards arrived in Cerquin, Lempira was fighting against neighboring chiefs, but because of their threat, he allied with the Lenca subgroup of Cares thus unifying the different Lenca tribes. Having gathered supplies and made preparation for the uprising, Lempira called his army together at the fortress of Cerquin hill, he organized resistance against the Spanish troops in 1537, managing to gather an army of almost 30,000 soldiers, from 200 villages. As a result, other groups also took up arms in the valley of Comayagua and Olancho.
He signaled the beginning of the war by killing three Spaniards passing through the region, and the Spanish forces retaliated by storming Cerquin. The attack on the fortress was prolonged (some estimates put the length of the siege at six months) but unsuccessful, and the Spanish were eventually forced to flee to Gracias, which Lempira quickly put under siege. Spanish attempts to stop him, led by Francisco de Montejo and Alonso de Cáceres, seeing no way to win their war, the Spanish leaders resorted to an assassination plan.
Lempira's death, according to legend, occurred when the Spanish captain Alonso de Caceres invited the chief to a false peace meeting on the edge of a high cliff. When Lempira refused to agree to an accord, a concealed soldier shot him in the forehead, and he fell off the cliff. After his death, which occurred in 1537, the resistance effort fell apart.