25 Céntimos Alarcón

Alarcón is a tiny walled medieval town in Cuenca province — its municipal council had no business issuing money, and yet here it is. During the Spanish Civil War, the Republican-held interior suffered an acute shortage of small change as hoarding stripped copper and silver from circulation almost entirely. Hundreds of municipalities, cooperatives, and even individual businesses responded by printing their own emergency fractional notes, a phenomenon documented across the Republican zone from 1936 onward.

The Gari Monserrat catalog remains the primary reference for these Spanish local issues, and the relative scarcity of Alarcón pieces reflects the town's very small population at the time.