1 ECU Don Quixote of La Mancha

The ECU — European Currency Unit — was never legal tender in Spain or anywhere else; it existed solely as a basket currency used for accounting within the European Monetary System. Spain's participation in this commemorative ECU program throughout the early 1990s was largely a political gesture toward European integration, issued years before the peseta would be retired for the euro in 2002.

Cervantes spent time imprisoned in Seville, where he later claimed the idea for Don Quixote first took shape — a detail the Spanish mint was almost certainly aware of when selecting the subject.