50 Céntimos Torrelles de Llobregat

Torrelles de Llobregat is a small municipality in the Baix Llobregat comarca, southwest of Barcelona, with a population in the late 1930s of well under a thousand. That it issued its own emergency fractional currency at all speaks directly to the collapse of small-denomination coinage during the early Republican war effort — the peseta coinage system effectively seized up in 1936 as metal was hoarded and Republican authorities struggled to maintain supply through conventional channels. Hundreds of Catalan municipalities filled the gap with locally printed paper, and Piulats in Barcelona handled the printing contracts for a significant number of them.