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1.50 Pesetas Barcelona
| Issuer | Ajuntament de Barcelona (Municipality of Barcelona) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1937 |
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| Composition | Paper |
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| Obverse description | The left third carries an intaglio vignette in deep carmine-red of the Barcelona municipal coat of arms — the quartered shield with the cross of Saint George and the four bars of Aragon — set above a fully rigged caravel in fine line engraving, surrounded by dense foliate scrollwork underprint. The right two-thirds bear the denomination in large letterpress type against a light guilloche underprint of repeating alphabetical characters in orange-red. Two manuscript facsimile signatures appear below their respective printed titles. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | 1·50 Façana antiga de l'Ajuntament AJUNTAMENT DE BARCELONA 1·50 PESSETES Aquest bitllet haurà de presentar-se al reembossament abans del 31 de desembre del 1938 (Translation: Old facade of the Town Hall / City Council of Barcelona / 1.50 Pesetas / This banknote must be presented for redemption before 31 December 1938) |
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| Comments |
Barcelona's municipal government began issuing its own fractional currency in 1937 as the Republican zone's small-change crisis worsened — centims and low-denomination coins had effectively vanished from circulation, hoarded or melted, leaving everyday transactions nearly impossible. The Ajuntament's notes were a local solution to a problem playing out in municipalities across Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia simultaneously, producing one of the most fragmented emission landscapes of any twentieth-century conflict.
The 1.50 peseta denomination is the awkward one in the series — an unusual value that speaks directly to the specific transactional gaps the city was trying to plug. Institut Gràfic Oliva de Vilanova was a well-regarded Catalan commercial printer, not a specialist security printer, which shows in the relatively modest anti-counterfeiting measures.