50 Céntimos Vilanova de Segrià

Vilanova de Segrià is a small municipality in the Lleida province of Catalonia, and this 50 céntimos piece belongs to the enormous wave of local emergency paper money — the moneda local or paper moneda — issued by Catalan and other Spanish municipalities during the Civil War years of 1936–1939, when Republican-zone coinage of small denominations essentially vanished from circulation. The copper and nickel coins had been hoarded, melted, or simply stopped circulating, leaving local councils with no practical option but to print their own.

At 46 × 40 mm, the format is characteristic of the smallest-denomination municipals — more token than banknote, really. Turró's cataloguing of over three thousand such issues from across Catalonia alone gives some measure of how widespread the problem was.