25 Céntimos Villarta

Villarta is a small municipality in Ciudad Real province, and like hundreds of Spanish towns during the summer of 1936, its local council scrambled to produce emergency fractional currency after the Republican government's coin supply collapsed almost immediately following the military uprising. These municipal issues — often little more than stamped card — were locally designed, locally printed, and backed by nothing more formal than the authority of whoever held office that week. The Consejo Municipal's official stamp is the only security feature, which tells you exactly how improvised the situation was.

Gari's catalog documents over two thousand of these Spanish Civil War municipal emissions. That this one survives at all is partly luck — most were redeemed, rejected, or simply discarded once the war moved on.