50 Céntims Hostalric

Hostalric is a small walled town in the Selva comarca of Girona province, and like hundreds of Catalan municipalities during the Civil War, it issued its own fractional currency when Republican-zone coinage effectively vanished from circulation in 1937. The central government's inability to supply small change forced local councils — ajuntaments — to fill the gap themselves, producing what collectors now catalog under the broad heading of "moneda local catalana." Most were printed on whatever commercial stock was available and backed by nothing more formal than municipal authority.

The C.A.M. imprint places this among a cluster of Catalan emergency issues produced by a Barcelona commercial printer that handled a number of similar municipal contracts that year. Turró's reference work remains the standard catalog for these issues.