Vilafant is a small municipality in the Alt Empordà comarca of Catalonia, and like hundreds of similarly modest towns, it issued its own emergency paper currency during the Spanish Civil War when the Republic's coinage supply collapsed almost entirely in 1936–37. Small copper and nickel coins vanished from circulation almost immediately after the July 1936 uprising — hoarded, melted, or simply lost in the chaos — leaving municipalities to fill the gap with locally authorized cardboard and paper fractional notes. These village-level emissions are collectively called "moneda local" or "paper moneda," and Turró's catalog documents over a thousand distinct municipal issuers from this period.
The official stamp is the only security measure — which tells you everything about the trust infrastructure these notes depended on: purely local, purely social.
Vilafant is a small municipality in the Alt Empordà comarca of Catalonia, and like hundreds of similarly modest towns, it issued its own emergency paper currency during the Spanish Civil War when the Republic's coinage supply collapsed almost entirely in 1936–37. Small copper and nickel coins vanished from circulation almost immediately after the July 1936 uprising — hoarded, melted, or simply lost in the chaos — leaving municipalities to fill the gap with locally authorized cardboard and paper fractional notes. These village-level emissions are collectively called "moneda local" or "paper moneda," and Turró's catalog documents over a thousand distinct municipal issuers from this period.
The official stamp is the only security measure — which tells you everything about the trust infrastructure these notes depended on: purely local, purely social.