Euro de Baie-Mahault

Baie-Mahault, on the western coast of Grande-Terre in Guadeloupe, issued this local euro as part of the brief wave of French municipal currency that swept through thousands of communes in the late 1990s ahead of the 2002 eurozone transition. These town-specific pieces were never legal tender — they circulated through local merchants by mutual agreement, functioning more as goodwill tokens and collectibles than genuine transactional currency. The program effectively ended when the euro arrived and rendered the promotional exercise moot.