5 Céntimos Villanueva de Castellón

Villanueva de Castellón is a small agricultural town in the Valencia region, and like hundreds of other Republican municipalities during the Civil War, it issued its own emergency small change when fractional coinage disappeared from circulation entirely — hoarded, melted, or simply lost to wartime disruption. These local vales and cartones were a practical stopgap, not a monetary policy statement. Most were printed on whatever card stock was locally available, which is why thickness and quality vary so sharply even within the same series.

The Turró and Gari catalogues together document over 2,000 distinct municipal issuers from this period. That sheer number is the real story — central Republican authority had effectively lost control of small-denomination exchange by 1937–38.