MADRID: It is well-documented that many Spaniards continue to have a tendency to keep at least part of their savings at home rather than in the bank, and 13 years after the peseta ceased to be Spain’s currency there is still a Spaniards continue to hold on to peseta fortunessurprisingly large amount of money being held in “old” cash: the Banco de España reports this week that as much as 1,659 million euros’ worth of pesetas has still not been changed into euros.
In other words, an average of 36 euros per inhabitant is still being held in pesetas: remove the eight million or so inhabitants who weren’t yet born in 2002 from the equation and the average savings figure is higher still.
The latest figures published by the Banco de España do show, however, that the total is slowly coming down: during May another million euros’ worth of pesetas were changed into euros, repeating the rate observed over the last couple of years, but there are still 856 million euros’ worth in notes and another 803 million in coins gathering dust somewhere. Last year a total of 11 million euros was changed from pesetas into euros, 9 million of them in notes.
When the changeover period to the euro began on 1st January 2002 there were almost 50,000 million euros’ worth of pesetas in circulation, most of which was eliminated in the following two months before the peseta was officially retired on 1st March. Until 30th June 2012 it was still possible to change pesetas into euros at any bank in the country, but now this can only be done by the Banco de España.
For anyone still hanging onto a peseta hoard, though, the deadline for changing it into euros is slowly approaching: as of 31st December 2020 such transactions will no longer be possible.
