0.25 Pesetas Ribesalbes

Ribesalbes is a small ceramic-producing municipality in the Castellón hinterland with a population that barely reached 600 during the 1930s. Like hundreds of similarly sized Spanish towns, it issued its own fractional paper currency during the Civil War to compensate for the near-total disappearance of metallic coinage — silver and copper both hoarded or melted almost immediately after July 1936.

The Gari Montllor catalog documents these Valencian municipal emissions with unusual thoroughness, which is the main reason pieces like this one have any traceable provenance at all. At quarter-peseta denomination, it was the smallest practical unit of exchange most councils bothered to print.