2.5 Escudos

Banco Nacional Ultramarino occupied an unusual position in Portuguese colonial finance — it held the note-issuing privilege not for metropolitan Portugal but for the overseas territories, a mandate it exercised across multiple distinct currency zones simultaneously. This 2.5 Escudos denomination was specific to Portuguese Guinea, one of the smaller and more commercially isolated of those territories, where fractional notes served real transactional purposes that coins could not reliably fill.

Bradbury Wilkinson produced the plate work in London, as they did for a considerable run of BNU colonial issues through the 1940s. The 1944 date places production during wartime, though Portugal's neutrality insulated the BNU printing program from the disruptions that affected other colonial currency arrangements at the time.