Gratallops is a tiny wine-producing village in the Priorat comarca of Catalonia, with a population that barely exceeded a few hundred during the Civil War. Like dozens of similarly small Republican municipalities in 1937, it issued emergency local coinage — cartones and metal pieces both — to address the near-total disappearance of small-denomination currency as the Republican economy fractured under wartime pressure. The central government's inability to supply adequate fractional coinage pushed this responsibility down to the municipal level, producing an extraordinary variety of hyper-local issues now collected as a distinct series.
Iron was the pragmatic choice by this point; copper and brass had higher strategic value.
Gratallops is a tiny wine-producing village in the Priorat comarca of Catalonia, with a population that barely exceeded a few hundred during the Civil War. Like dozens of similarly small Republican municipalities in 1937, it issued emergency local coinage — cartones and metal pieces both — to address the near-total disappearance of small-denomination currency as the Republican economy fractured under wartime pressure. The central government's inability to supply adequate fractional coinage pushed this responsibility down to the municipal level, producing an extraordinary variety of hyper-local issues now collected as a distinct series.
Iron was the pragmatic choice by this point; copper and brass had higher strategic value.