0.25 Pesetas Guadasequies

Guadasequies is a tiny municipality in the Valencia province — population well under a thousand even today — and in 1937 it was one of hundreds of Republican-zone Spanish villages that simply ran out of small change. The Civil War had caused catastrophic hoarding of metal coinage, and the central government's response was too slow and too uneven to reach every corner of the country. Local councils stepped in with their own emergency fractional paper, the so-called "billetes locales de necesidad," issued on whatever authority the municipal consejo could claim.

The handstamp is the only security measure, which tells you everything about the conditions of production. Notes from localities this small were printed in absurdly small runs and rarely survived the war.