The colón was the currency of El Salvador between 1892 and 2001, until it was substituted by the U.S. Dollar. It was subdivided into 100 centavos and its ISO 4217 code was SVC. The plural is colones in Spanish and was named after Christopher Columbus, known as Cristóbal Colón in Spanish.

The symbol for the colón is a c with two slashes. The symbol "₡" has Unicodecode point U+20A1, and the decimal representation is 8353. In HTML it can be entered as ₡. The colón sign is not to be confused with the centsign (¢), which has a code point U+00A2 in Unicode (or 162 in decimal), or with the cedi sign ₵, which has a code point U+20B5 in Unicode (or 8373 in decimal).

Because the colón replaced the peso at par, 1 and 5 centavos coins issued before 1919 continued to be issued without design change after the colón's introduction. In 1921, cupro-nickel 10 centavos were introduced, followed by silver 25 centavos in 1943. In 1953, silver 50 centavos were introduced alongside smaller silver 25 centavos. Both were replaced by nickel coins in 1970. In 1974, nickel-brass 2 and 3 centavos coins were introduced, followed by 1 colón coins in 1984.

On August 31, 1934, the new banking institution put into circulation the first family of banknotes in Salvadoran history. Until 1934, paper money was issued by private banks. Three banks issued notes, the Banco Agricola Comercial, the Banco Occidental and the Banco Salvadoreño. They were issued in one, five, ten, twenty-five and one hundred colones, adding two and fifty colones banknotes in 1955. The last 2 colones notes were dated 1976 and the last 1 colón note was issued in 1982. 200 colones banknotes were introduced in 1997.