0.25 Pesetas Benigánim

Benigánim is a small municipality in the Valencia province, and like hundreds of other Spanish towns during the Civil War, its municipal council issued emergency fractional currency — locally called *cartones* or *vales* — to address the near-total disappearance of small metal coinage from circulation. Silver and copper had been hoarded or requisitioned almost immediately after July 1936, leaving everyday transactions without a workable medium. Republican-zone towns were largely left to solve the problem themselves.

The Turró and Garicategui catalogues together document well over a thousand such local issues from the Valencia region alone. Benigánim's quarter-peseta is among the smaller-format municipal emissions, and survival rates for these cardboard or thin-paper issues are generally poor — they were ephemeral by design, intended to last only until the crisis passed. It never did, for most issuers.