21 | Spanish Banknotes

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5 Pesetas. 1914. Not issued. Front and back test (adhered together). (Edifil 2021: NE16P, Pick: 68AP). Extraordinarily rare, to give us an idea of ​​the rarity of this specimen, the Edifil catalog illustrates the standard banknote with a test very similar to this one, in our opinion it is only known like this. Uncirculated.

The legislation in force until the outbreak of the Civil War (and afterwards as well, since what happened in the meantime was one exception after another that lasted for a decade after the end of the war), limited the creation and issuance of bank notes. at values ​​between 25 and 1,000 pesetas. However, the Bank of Spain worked on smaller bills on several occasions due to various circumstances.

One of them was a consequence of the First World War. Fiduciary circulation grew extraordinary and these banknotes found support in the large amount of gold acquired by the Bank of Spain during that period. Its reserves of the yellow metal multiplied by five in a decade and became the fourth in the world. However, at the beginning of the war, the Bank feared a rise in the price of silver that could lead to its hoarding by the public. With that idea in mind, the Bank secretly worked on a 5 peseta bill that would serve to withdraw money from circulation in favor of the entity. But since the Bank was able to acquire so much gold during the war, the project was eventually stopped and the test notes were destroyed before being put into circulation. This work, curiously, was not the first, since the Bank had also planned the issuance of banknotes of the same denomination in 1898, during the worst moment of crisis of the Cuban war. Finally, this type of issues came to light during the Civil War with silver certificates, which had been ordered well before the military uprising, so it is reasonable to think that they would have been put into circulation in one way or another.

Of this design and production effort from 1914, only a few loose printing tests of the front and back remain, valued for their great rarity.