Collection - Coins and Notes - Diário de Notícias # 79 5 Centavos Notgeld

Banco do Minho's 1919 emergency small change issues belong to a short-lived Portuguese notgeld moment triggered by acute coin shortages in the final years of the First Republic. Silver had effectively vanished from circulation, hoarded or melted, and low-denomination bronze coinage was chronically undersupplied by the Casa da Moeda. Regional banks and commercial houses across northern Portugal stepped in with cédulas — locally authorized paper substitutes — to keep retail trade moving.

The Diário de Notícias collection numbering suggests this note was later issued as part of a promotional series bundled with the Lisbon newspaper, which reproduced historic Portuguese emergency currency for collectors in the 1970s–80s. That provenance matters: catalog values and condition expectations differ sharply between original 1919 circulation pieces and the later facsimile or collector editions.