25 Céntimos Andújar

Andújar, a town in Jaén province, issued this note during the Spanish Civil War under Republican municipal authority. The Consejo Municipal produced small-denomination emergency paper — billetes de necesidad — to address the chronic shortage of fractional coinage that gripped Republican-held territories from 1936 onward. Silver and copper had vanished from circulation almost immediately after the July 1936 uprising, hoarded or melted, leaving municipalities scrambling to fill the gap.

The printer, Artes Gráficas U.R.I., was a Valencian anarcho-syndicalist collective operating under CNT-UGT control — the initials stand for Unión de Ramas Industriales. That many of these hyper-local wartime issues were printed by a single syndicated workshop explains the family resemblance across otherwise unrelated municipal emissions.