50 Céntimos Berga

Berga is a small Catalan town in the Berguedà comarca, and like hundreds of Spanish municipalities during the Civil War, it was forced to produce its own fractional currency after the Republican government's chronic coin shortage made small-denomination transactions nearly impossible. The Generalitat de Catalunya had authorized municipal issues in 1936, triggering an explosion of locally printed paper that varied wildly in quality and denominations.

The C.A.M. printer in Barcelona handled a number of these emergency municipal commissions, which gives this piece slightly more production consistency than notes run off on purely local presses. Thin paper was typical of wartime supply constraints, and surviving examples frequently show stress at the folds.