1 Peseta Espinelves

Espinelves is a tiny municipality in the Osona comarca of Catalonia — its population in the 1930s barely exceeded two hundred. That a village of this size issued its own emergency currency in 1937 is less surprising than it sounds: the collapse of small-denomination coinage during the Spanish Civil War forced hundreds of Catalan municipalities to print their own local paper money under authorization from the Generalitat de Catalunya, and Espinelves was simply one of the smallest to do so.

Turró catalogues this note at #945, placing it well into the long sequence of Catalan municipally-issued wartime notes. Survival rates for these village emissions vary enormously — the smaller the issuer, the fewer notes printed, but also the fewer that escaped destruction or the 1939 redemption ban imposed by the Franco regime.