1 Peseta Pobla de Mafumet

La Pobla de Mafumet is a small municipality just outside Tarragona, and like dozens of Catalan towns during the Civil War, it issued its own fractional currency in 1937 when Republican Spain faced a chronic shortage of small change — coins had been hoarded, melted, or simply vanished from circulation. These local emergency notes, collectively known as moneda de necessitat, were authorized under the Generalitat de Catalunya and printed by whatever local press was available. Here, Tipografia A. Ventura in Tarragona handled the job.

Turró catalogues over two thousand such issues, which gives some sense of how atomized the system became. A village of a few hundred souls issuing its own peseta was not unusual — it was policy by improvisation.