1 Peseta Pauls

During the Spanish Civil War, the Republican government's Generalitat de Catalunya authorized Catalan municipalities to issue their own emergency small-change notes — moneda de paper — to address the acute shortage of metal coinage, which had been hoarded or melted down almost immediately after July 1936. Paüls, a village in the Terra Alta comarca of Tarragona with a wartime population of only a few hundred, was among the smallest communities to exercise this authority.

The Turró catalogue documents hundreds of these municipal emissions, but the Paüls 1 Pesseta is among the more obscure. Survival rates for notes from tiny inland villages tend to be low — small print runs, rough handling, and the chaos of the Nationalist advance through Aragon and Catalonia in 1938–39 saw most destroyed or lost.