25 Céntimos Borrassà

Borrassà is a tiny municipality in Alt Empordà, Girona, and this 25 céntimos note is a product of the acute small-change shortage that paralyzed much of Republican-held Catalonia from 1936 onward. With silver coinage hoarded and the central government slow to respond, hundreds of local councils — including ones with populations in the hundreds — began issuing their own emergency fractional currency under a framework loosely authorized by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Turró 499 places this firmly within that municipal emergency emission series. The official stamp served as the primary anti-counterfeiting measure, which says something about the improvised nature of the whole enterprise — and about how little counterfeiting risk anyone seriously expected at this scale.