1 Peseta Pau de Sert

Pau de Sert is a tiny municipality in the Alt Empordà comarca of Catalonia, and this note is one of hundreds of hyper-local emergency issues produced by Catalan town councils during the Spanish Civil War. The Republican government's decree of June 1937 authorized municipalities to issue small-denomination paper money to address a chronic shortage of coins — silver and copper had largely disappeared from circulation by that point, hoarded or melted down.

The Turró catalog is the standard reference for these Catalan municipal issues, and Pau de Sert's entry is among the more obscure ones, reflecting the village's extremely small population. Survival rate for these issues varies enormously; the smaller the municipality, the smaller the print run, and most were redeemed and destroyed once the crisis passed — or simply became worthless after Franco's victory in 1939.