50 Centimos Badalona; Unió de Cooperadors

During the Spanish Civil War, the Republican zone suffered an acute shortage of small-denomination coinage — silver and copper had been hoarded or melted — forcing hundreds of local bodies, cooperatives, and municipalities to print their own emergency scrip. The Unió de Cooperadors de Badalona was among the cooperative associations that stepped into that vacuum, issuing fractional notes that functioned as local currency within a geographically limited circulation area.

Catalogued under both the Gari monetary reference for Catalan Civil War issues and the broader AL series, this 50 Centimos piece sits in a well-documented but highly fragmented collecting field where condition varies wildly — many examples survived folded in pockets or ledger books, never redeemed after Franco's victory rendered them worthless.