50 Centimos Barcelona; Unió de Cooperadors

The Unió de Cooperadors de Barcelona was a well-established workers' cooperative federation, and when the Spanish Civil War effectively collapsed conventional banking in Republican-controlled Catalonia during the summer of 1936, cooperative bodies like this one stepped into the vacuum by issuing their own emergency fractional currency. These vales circulated as functional substitutes for coinage, which had vanished almost overnight as silver and copper were hoarded or melted.

Imprenta Martí, Marí y Cia. produced a number of these local emergency issues for Barcelona organizations during that chaotic period — a practical printer working fast under difficult conditions, not a security printing house.