0.50 Pesetas Villanueva de Alcolea

Villanueva de Alcolea is a small municipality in Castellón province, and like hundreds of Spanish towns during the Civil War, its local council stepped in to fill an acute shortage of fractional coinage — Republican-zone copper and silver had largely disappeared from circulation by mid-1936 through hoarding, melting, and disruption to the mint supply chain. These emergency municipal issues, known as billetes de necesidad, were authorised informally and varied wildly in production quality from town to town.

The Gari Monovar catalogue remains the primary reference for these Castellón provincial issues. At 55 × 40 mm, this is among the smallest paper money Spain ever formally put into circulation.