1 Centavo Montemor-O-Novo

Associação Comercial de Montemor-O-Novo was one of dozens of Portuguese commercial and municipal associations that issued cédulas — emergency fractional paper — during the acute coin shortage that gripped Portugal from roughly 1917 onward. Silver and bronze coins vanished from circulation as hoarding accelerated, and local bodies stepped in where the Banco de Portugal would not. These square-format issues from Montemor-o-Novo are among the more unusual proportions in the cédula series; the 53×53mm format is genuinely square, a rarity in the broader local emergency issue corpus.

Validity depended entirely on the hand-applied stamp — without it, the note had no standing. Unstamped survivors exist and are worth considerably less.