50 Céntimos Ripollet

Ripollet is a small industrial municipality in the Vallès Occidental comarca, just north of Barcelona. Like hundreds of Catalan towns during the Civil War, the ajuntament issued its own fractional paper currency in 1937 to address the near-total disappearance of metallic coinage — silver and copper had been hoarded, melted, or requisitioned almost immediately after July 1936. The result was a proliferation of local emergency notes, the so-called "moneda local," varying wildly in quality depending on what printing resources each town could access.

El Secretariat Català handled a significant volume of these municipal issues out of Barcelona, which gives this note somewhat more consistent production than notes struck on office duplicators in smaller comarcal towns.