5 Céntimos Sarrià de Ter

Sarrià de Ter is a small industrial municipality on the Ter river just outside Girona, and like hundreds of Catalan towns during the Civil War, it faced an acute shortage of metallic currency by 1937 as the Republican government struggled to maintain basic economic functions in the rearguard. The Consell Municipal issued these cardboard emergency pieces — moneda de paper, as Catalans called them — under a decree permitting local authorities to produce their own fractional currency to keep commerce moving.

At 45mm, this is unusually large for a 5-céntim value, a practical concession to cardboard's fragility: smaller pieces simply disintegrated in pockets.