50 Céntimos Alhama de Murcia

In the first weeks of the Spanish Civil War, the collapse of small coin circulation — silver hoarded, copper distrusted — forced hundreds of municipalities and political committees across the Republican zone to print their own fractional emergency notes. This piece was issued by the local U.G.T. committee in Alhama de Murcia, a small spa town in the Segura valley, acting not as a bank but as a de facto civil authority filling the vacuum left by the Nationalist advance and monetary disruption of summer 1936.

These Murcian local issues were typically produced on whatever printing equipment was at hand. Survival rates vary sharply by locality — some were redeemed and destroyed, others simply abandoned when Republican administration collapsed.