5 ECU Ildefons Cerdá

Ildefons Cerdà's inclusion in a Spanish ECU issue is quietly ironic: the man who designed Barcelona's Eixample expansion grid in 1859 was a Catalan urban planner whose work was initially rejected by local authorities and had to be imposed by the Madrid central government — against the wishes of the very city it reshaped. Spain minting his portrait on a European currency piece in the 1990s represents a striking posthumous rehabilitation by the same centralist state that had to override Barcelona to honor his plan in the first place.