1 Peseta Balaguer

Municipal emergency currency printed during the Spanish Civil War, when the collapse of normal coin supply forced hundreds of Catalan and Spanish municipalities to issue their own paper. Balaguer, a small town on the Segre River in the Noguera comarca of Lleida, was in Republican-held territory in 1937 — the Ajuntament had both the political authority and, through the worker-controlled Imprenta Unió Obrera, the means to produce its own fractional notes.

The printer's name reflects the anarcho-syndicalist collectivization of industry that swept Republican Catalonia in the early war years. The Imprenta Unió Obrera was not a commercial house but a workers' collective that had taken over the press. Turró catalogs well over two thousand such local issues; Balaguer's is entry 275.