25 Pesetas Bilbao; replica

Bilbao fell to Franco's Nationalist forces in June 1937, making the window for this emission extraordinarily narrow. The Republican-controlled Basque government authorized regional branches of the Banco de España to issue their own notes during the Civil War, a decentralized arrangement born entirely of wartime necessity — Madrid could not reliably supply the north.

This is a replica. The originals are scarce enough that reproductions entered the collector market decades ago, and attribution of unattributed examples warrants close scrutiny of paper stock and watermark fidelity.