0 Euro - Fort Boyard

Fort Boyard sits on a sandbank in the Pertuis d'Antioche strait off the Charente-Maritime coast — a structure the French military spent nearly fifty years building, starting in 1804, only to declare it militarily obsolete before the last stone was laid. It has spent most of its existence being repurposed: briefly a prison, then abandoned, then a film set, then a television game show that became unexpectedly durable across Europe.

The EuroSouvenir program launched in 2015 as a legal zero-denomination collector item under EU regulation — spendable nowhere, but technically genuine in that Oberthur printed them to banknote specification with a real hologram strip. Fort Boyard was among the inaugural subjects.