50 Céntimos Castellciutat

Castellciutat is a tiny settlement in the Alt Urgell comarca of Catalonia, perched near the confluence of the Valira and Segre rivers — and like hundreds of other small Catalan municipalities, it issued its own emergency paper money during the Spanish Civil War. The Republican government's decree of June 1937 authorized local councils to produce small-denomination currency to address the chronic shortage of metallic coinage, which had been hoarded, melted down for the war effort, or simply stopped circulating.

The cardboard substrate is typical of the material constraints facing village councils with no access to proper banknote stock. Turró 704 places this issue within the documented corpus of Alt Urgell municipal emissions, a region where the proximity to the Andorran border gave the local economy its own particular pressures.