2 Pesetas Cinco Olivas

Cinco Olivas is a small agricultural village in Aragon, and this note was issued by its collectivized community during the brief anarcho-syndicalist experiment that swept the region after July 1936. The CNT-FAO collectives operating across Aragon effectively replaced the peseta with local scrip as a matter of ideological conviction as much as practical necessity — cash had fled, silver had vanished, and the collectives distrusted the Republican banking system nearly as much as they distrusted Franco.

The security feature here is a rubber stamp impression, typical of how these village collectives authenticated their emissions with whatever materials were available. Gari Mon catalogues dozens of such Aragonese issues; 539-D denotes a specific stamp variant, suggesting at least minor differences existed within the Cinco Olivas emission itself.