El Vilosell is a tiny municipality in the Les Garrigues comarca of Lleida province, with a population that barely exceeded a few hundred during the Republic. Like hundreds of Catalan villages in 1937, it issued its own small-change notes — *moneda de necessitat* — because the Civil War had driven metallic coinage out of circulation entirely, hoarded or melted down for the war effort. The Ajuntament's authority to issue was technically sanctioned by the Generalitat de Catalunya, which attempted to regulate the flood of local emergency scrip with limited success.
Arts Gràfiques Ilerda was a Lleida-based printer responsible for a significant number of these municipal issues across the province. The sole security measure is an official stamp — wholly inadequate against forgery, though the hyperlocal acceptance zone made counterfeiting largely pointless.
El Vilosell is a tiny municipality in the Les Garrigues comarca of Lleida province, with a population that barely exceeded a few hundred during the Republic. Like hundreds of Catalan villages in 1937, it issued its own small-change notes — *moneda de necessitat* — because the Civil War had driven metallic coinage out of circulation entirely, hoarded or melted down for the war effort. The Ajuntament's authority to issue was technically sanctioned by the Generalitat de Catalunya, which attempted to regulate the flood of local emergency scrip with limited success.
Arts Gràfiques Ilerda was a Lleida-based printer responsible for a significant number of these municipal issues across the province. The sole security measure is an official stamp — wholly inadequate against forgery, though the hyperlocal acceptance zone made counterfeiting largely pointless.