25 Centimos Montblanc; Colectividad Agrícola

One of hundreds of local emergency emissions produced across Republican-held Spain during the Civil War, this note was issued by the agricultural collective at Montblanc — a town in Tarragona province where CNT and UGT unions jointly administered the local economy after the July 1936 rising. The dual CNT-UGT sponsorship is itself significant: the two union federations were ideological rivals, and joint collectives of this kind required continuous negotiation to function.

Municipal and collective scrip of this type filled a genuine vacuum. Coin had vanished from circulation almost immediately after the war began, hoarded or melted, and the Republican government lacked both the infrastructure and the speed to supply adequate small change to every locality. Montblanc printed its own.