25 Céntimos Mateo de las Fuentes

Mateo de las Fuentes is a small municipality in Cuenca province, Castile. During the Spanish Civil War, the Republican zone suffered an acute shortage of small-denomination coinage — silver and copper had been hoarded or melted — forcing hundreds of local councils to issue their own emergency scrip. This note is one of those hyper-local solutions, authorized under the broad emergency powers exercised by Republican municipal governments from 1936 onward.

The Gari Montserrat catalog documents over a thousand such issues from Cuenca province alone, which gives some sense of how atomized this emergency currency system became.