Tessender - Tessenderlo

Belgian municipal token coinage — the so-called "noodgeld" or necessity money issued by communes — proliferated during periods when official small change was scarce or administratively inconvenient to distribute locally. Tessenderlo, a small municipality in the Flemish province of Limburg, issued this piece in 1984 at a time when such local tokens were already anachronistic, suggesting a specific civic or commemorative purpose rather than genuine circulatory need.

Alpaca, a copper-nickel-zinc alloy, was the workhorse metal of Belgian local token issues throughout the postwar decades.