1 Piece of Bacon Solsona, Lérida

Solsona's 1940 bacon note is one of the stranger artifacts of Spanish postwar economic improvisation. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, acute coin shortages pushed municipalities across Catalonia to issue their own emergency fractional currency — but Solsona went further, denominating some of its local scrip not in pesetas or céntimos but in physical commodities. One piece of bacon. The issuing authority was the town council itself, the Ayuntamiento, operating with essentially no oversight from a central government still consolidating power under Franco.

Commodity-denominated municipal scrip of this kind was already obsolete almost the moment it was printed.