A Colombian woman who reportedly swallowed thousands of dollars in a bid to conceal the money from her husband had to undergo surgery to remove it.

The 30-year-old told the local RCN television channel she swallowed around 57 hundred dollar notes following a furious row between the pair.

She claimed to have saved up the money to pay for a holiday but was worried her husband would spend it.

Surgeons were able to extract the notes from the woman’s stomach and intestines,

"Fifty-seven 100-dollar bills were found and extracted by the orifice opened in the stomach in the gastronomy, through which some extra rolls (of money) were found in the intestine, which advanced to the colon, the lower part of the intestine, in order to be evacuated by normal means through the patient’s intestinal movements," said the Director of Surgery at the University Hospital of Santander, Juan Paulo Serrano,

He added that as the bills were not wrapped in anything, suggesting a lack of planning or any illicit reason for swallowing them.