50 Céntimos Torre de Fontaubella

Torre de Fontaubella is a tiny municipality in the Priorat comarca of Tarragona province, and like hundreds of other Catalan and Spanish towns, it issued its own emergency paper currency during the Civil War — a direct consequence of the Republican government's failure to supply sufficient coinage to local economies after 1936. The Turró catalogue documents thousands of these municipal emissions; this 50 céntimos piece from the Alcaldía Constitucional is among the more obscure, issued by a community whose population at the time numbered only in the hundreds.

Survival rates for these hyper-local wartime issues are unpredictable. Some were printed in such small quantities that almost nothing remains; others surfaced in bulk from a single hoard decades later.