50 Céntimos Altea

Altea is a coastal town in the Valencia region, and like hundreds of municipalities across Republican Spain in 1937, it faced an acute shortage of small change after the outbreak of the Civil War — the hoarding and melting of coins effectively eliminated fractional currency from daily use. The CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), the anarcho-syndicalist union that held real administrative authority in many Valencian localities during this period, stepped in to fill the gap by issuing their own emergency scrip through local cooperatives.

This 50 céntimos piece from the Altea cooperative is one of the smaller-denomination vales de necesidad that circulated purely within the local economy, redeemable only through the issuing body. Such notes lost all value when the Nationalist advance reached the region in mid-1938.