25 Centimos Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla

Issued by the Spanish Republican government during the Civil War, this cardboard piece emerged from a near-total collapse of metallic coinage in the loyalist zone — copper and nickel had been requisitioned for the war effort, and Republican-held territory was hemorrhaging hard currency. The Fábrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre produced these emergency issues in several denominations, printed rather than struck, as a stopgap that most of the population treated with open skepticism.

Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, the 19th-century liberal politician whose name this note-coin bears, had died in French exile in 1895 after spending years organizing failed republican uprisings against the Bourbon restoration. His appearance on a wartime emergency issue was pointed political messaging, not coincidence.