Collection - Coins and Notes - Diário de Notícias #74 2 Centavos Notgeld

Vila Real de Santo António's municipal chamber issued these small-denomination cédulas in the early 1920s to address a chronic shortage of low-value coinage that plagued much of Portugal during the postwar period. The Republic's centavo coins, introduced after 1910, were minted in insufficient quantities to meet everyday retail demand, pushing dozens of municipalities and private businesses to print their own emergency paper substitutes.

The Diário de Notícias connection is the unusual detail here — this note was part of a promotional series issued in collaboration with, or distributed through, the Lisbon newspaper, an arrangement that appears across several Portuguese municipal cédulas of this type. Whether the newspaper subsidized production or simply acted as distributor is not firmly established.