25 Céntimos Benisa

Benisa is a small coastal town in Alicante province, and like hundreds of Spanish municipalities during the Civil War, it briefly became its own monetary authority out of sheer necessity. The national currency supply collapsed in the Republican zone after 1936 as hoarding and wartime disruption drained coins from circulation entirely. Local trade unions, cooperatives, and town councils filled the gap with emergency paper — vales, billetes locales — that technically had no legal standing beyond the issuing community's own enforcement.

This particular note is unusual in that the issuing body was not the municipal council but the UGT commercial and office workers' union, giving it a distinctly syndicalist character. Circulation would have been hyper-local and short-lived. The Gari Montllor catalog remains the primary reference for this material, and many Alicante provincial issues survive in tiny quantities.