Navàs is a small industrial town in the Bages comarca of Catalonia, and this 50 céntimos note is a product of the chaotic emergency coinage — moneda local — that proliferated across Republican-controlled Spain during the Civil War. The central government's inability to maintain adequate small-change circulation forced hundreds of municipalities to issue their own scrip, authorized under a 1937 decree from the Generalitat de Catalunya. Turró catalogues over two thousand such issues.
The municipal stamp is the only anti-counterfeiting measure — not an unusual arrangement for notes of this denomination and origin, where production was often handled by local printers with no security printing capability whatsoever.
Navàs is a small industrial town in the Bages comarca of Catalonia, and this 50 céntimos note is a product of the chaotic emergency coinage — moneda local — that proliferated across Republican-controlled Spain during the Civil War. The central government's inability to maintain adequate small-change circulation forced hundreds of municipalities to issue their own scrip, authorized under a 1937 decree from the Generalitat de Catalunya. Turró catalogues over two thousand such issues.
The municipal stamp is the only anti-counterfeiting measure — not an unusual arrangement for notes of this denomination and origin, where production was often handled by local printers with no security printing capability whatsoever.