10 Céntimos Siles

Siles is a small municipality in Jaén province, and this note was issued by its local supply commission — one of the thousands of emergency fractional pieces that flooded Republican-held Spain after July 1936, when the hoarding of metal coinage created an acute shortage of small change almost overnight. The Comisión de Abastos was a wartime rationing and supply body, not a financial institution, which makes its entry into currency issuance a measure of how completely the normal monetary infrastructure had collapsed at the municipal level.

The handstamp serves as the sole security feature — which is to say, almost none at all.