2 Pesetas Altorricón

Altorricón is a small agricultural village in the Huesca province of Aragon, and this card-money piece dates to the anarchist-influenced revolutionary period of the early Spanish Civil War, when hundreds of Aragonese municipalities issued their own emergency local currency after the banking system effectively collapsed behind Republican lines. The Consejo Municipal — a body that in many Aragon villages had been transformed or replaced outright by anarcho-syndicalist committees by late 1936 — authorized these pieces to keep local commerce moving when coin disappeared from circulation almost overnight.

Card stock issues from villages this small rarely survived in quantity. Altorricón's wartime population was numbered in the hundreds.