5 Céntimos Santo Tomé

Municipal emergency fractional currency from Santo Tomé, Argentina — likely issued during one of the recurrent small-change shortages that plagued provincial towns in the early twentieth century, when federal coin supplies routinely failed to reach the interior. Local councils across Santa Fe and Córdoba provinces resorted to cardboard tokens of this kind, printed locally in small runs with minimal security features and no central bank oversight whatsoever.

The Gari Monetary catalogue reference places this in a well-documented but thinly collected category. Survival rates for municipal cardboard fractionals are poor — the issuers rarely bothered to redeem them formally, and the material itself was never meant to last.