25 Unidades Binéfar

Local Spanish Civil War banknotes: Created by municipalities, cooperatives, unions and other organizations due to the scarcity of fiduciary currency in small purchases and exchanges during the Spanish Civil War.

Municipality: Binéfar - Province: Huesca - Autonomous community: Aragon

The chronology, both of the political situation and of the banknotes that were issued in the Aragon area, was as follows:
1st stage (end of 1936): Each free municipality was organized in different ways, although the way to do it was not clear until the first ones started up. At this first moment, sealed and signed vouchers were issued that, on many occasions, were used to purchase basic necessities such as bread or oil.
2nd stage (January to August 1937): as the months progressed, the communities began to settle and began to have important contacts with Catalan populations and even with the Generalitat itself. It was at this stage when vouchers began to disappear and the printing of banknotes began, in many cases, very elaborate. Many of them were made in CNT's own printing presses both in Aragon and Barcelona. The vast majority of people chose as their monetary system what they knew: the peseta and the centimos, but there were some populations that rejected this idea as they associated it with the capitalism that they so desperately wanted to eradicate. 

That is why other systems were invented such as the “Enteros” system of Andorra (town, not country), “Puntos” system of Graus and some other issuers or, in this case, Unidades and Grados in Binéfar (each Unidad was equivalent to 100 Grados).

Although the intention was to create a different monetary system, at Numista we equated Unidades to Pesetas and Grados to Centimos, since we considered that this should be the equivalent system of the time.