25 Céntimos Híjar

Híjar is a small town in Aragon, and like hundreds of Spanish municipalities during the Civil War, its dominant labor collective — here a joint UGT-CNT body — issued its own emergency scrip when coinage vanished from circulation almost overnight after July 1936. The hoarding of metal was immediate and universal; paper filled the gap at the hyperlocal level, often with denominations too small for the state to bother producing.

The printer, Artes Gráficas CNT, was a Barcelona workshop collectivized by its own workers early in the war. That the anarcho-syndicalist CNT shared issuing authority here with the socialist UGT is itself notable — the two unions were frequently in ideological conflict, and joint issues at the municipal level reflect the pragmatic compromises that local economic collapse forced on competing factions.