2 Centavos Funchal

The Asilo de Mendicidade e Órfãos — a poorhouse and orphanage in Funchal, Madeira — was among dozens of Portuguese charitable institutions and local municipalities that resorted to issuing their own emergency paper during the acute coin shortage of 1917–1918. The Portuguese government had effectively failed to keep small-denomination metallic currency in circulation, and the gap was filled by a patchwork of cédulas from bodies that had no business being in the money-printing trade.

These Madeiran institutional notes are among the more obscure survivors of that episode. Redemption was never guaranteed once the emergency passed.