20 Centimos Alcolea del Pinar

Alcolea del Pinar is a small Castilian municipality on the road between Madrid and Zaragoza, and in 1937 it was sitting in Nationalist-held territory where the collapse of the Republican peseta's credibility — and chronic shortages of small metallic coinage — forced hundreds of Spanish towns to issue their own emergency scrip. These cartones moneda, printed on cardboard, were a purely local solution to a purely local problem: making change.

At 35mm, this piece is unusually large for a 20-céntimos denomination, a consequence of cardboard's inability to convey value through heft.