50 Céntimos Gualba

Gualba is a village in the Vallès Oriental comarca with a population that barely crested 500 during the Civil War years. That a municipality this small issued its own paper currency speaks directly to the crisis of small change that paralyzed Republican Catalonia from 1936 onward — silver and copper had effectively vanished from everyday transactions, hoarded or melted, forcing hundreds of local councils to print their own emergency fractional notes under a framework loosely sanctioned by the Generalitat.

El Secretariat Català printed for dozens of these tiny municipal issuers out of Barcelona, producing workmanlike but often charmingly idiosyncratic results. Turró catalogues fewer than a handful of Gualba issues, making survival in any grade genuinely uncommon.