20 Centimos Covelo

Covelo is a small municipality in the hills of Pontevedra province, and like dozens of Galician towns in 1937, it faced a total collapse of small-denomination coinage. The Nationalist zone's monetary supply had fragmented almost immediately after the July 1936 uprising, with the Republican government in Madrid withholding coin shipments and local hoarding doing the rest. Cardboard emergency issues — cartones — filled the gap, authorized at the municipal level with no central oversight and redeemable, in theory, only within the issuing township.

Most surviving examples show significant edge wear from handling, the cardboard medium offering almost no resistance to circulation damage.