0.20 Pesetas Barcelona; Vidrieria Barcelonesa

Vidrieria Barcelonesa was a glassworks company operating in Barcelona under the Vilella family partnership. This note belongs to the wave of privately issued emergency fractional currency — moneda de empresa — that proliferated across Catalonia and the rest of Republican-controlled Spain from 1936 onward, as the Civil War drained small-denomination coinage from circulation. The practice continued well into the early Franco years for the same reason: the Nationalist government was slow to restore adequate change.

A glassworks firm issuing circulating scrip redeemable at face value is exactly the kind of micro-monetary arrangement that characterizes this period more than any other in modern Spanish monetary history.