2 Pesetas Madrid

Issued by the Madrid city government during the siege of the Spanish capital, this cardboard token filled a vacuum created by the near-total disappearance of metallic coinage — hoarded, melted, or simply absent in a city under Nationalist bombardment. Republican Spain's central government had largely lost control of currency circulation at the local level by 1937, forcing municipalities and even anarchist collectives to print their own emergency money.

Madrid held out until March 1939, the longest urban siege of the war.