5 Centimos Ulldecona; Colectividad Campesina

Ulldecona, a small agricultural town in the Baix Ebre comarca of Tarragona, fell within the anarchist-controlled zone during the Spanish Civil War. The Colectividad Campesina — a peasant collective organized under the C.N.T.-F.A.I. — issued this vales as local scrip after conventional currency became scarce or ideologically suspect in collectivized communities. Hundreds of similar emergency emissions appeared across Republican Catalonia and Aragon between 1936 and 1938, each tied to a specific collective or municipality and worthless beyond its immediate community.

The stamp serves as the only anti-counterfeiting measure — modest even by the standards of wartime local issues. Printed by Imprenta Martí, Marí y Cia. in Barcelona, one of several commercial print shops that handled the bulk of Catalan collectivity scrip during this period.