0.25 Pesetas Begues

Begues is a small municipality in the Baix Llobregat comarca, southwest of Barcelona, and like hundreds of Catalan and Spanish towns during the Civil War, it resorted to printing its own fractional currency when Republican-zone coinage effectively disappeared from circulation — hoarded, melted, or simply swept away by wartime disruption. The Generalitat de Catalunya had authorized local emergency issues, giving legal cover to what would otherwise have been monetary chaos.

Printed by Imp. El Secretariat Català, a Barcelona press with strong ties to Catalanist cultural institutions, this quarter-peseta note is catalogued under Turró 345. The official stamp substitutes for more sophisticated security measures — entirely typical of the resource constraints facing small municipal administrations in 1937.