1.50 Pesetas Barcelona

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.