Three equal horizontal stripes, light blue (celeste), white and light blue, with a golden Sun of May in the middle of the white band: that is the flag of Argentina. Popular belief says the blue and white are the sky and its clouds, while most historians trace them to the blue-and-white cockade of the 1810 May Revolution and, behind that, to the colours of the Spanish House of Bourbon. The sun, with a human face and 32 rays, copies the emblem on Argentina’s first coin of 1813 and stands for the May Revolution. General Manuel Belgrano created the flag and first raised it at Rosario on 27 February 1812; the Congress of Tucumán made it the national flag on 20 July 1816, the sun was added in 1818, and Argentines celebrate it on Flag Day, 20 June, the anniversary of Belgrano’s death in 1820.
Celeste, White and the Sol de Mayo: Reading the Design
The two blues are the same shade, and the Spanish word celeste (sky blue) is used for them. The sky-and-clouds story is repeated in flag songs such as “Aurora” and is what most Argentines learn first, but historians generally set it aside. The colours were worn on the cockade before they ever flew on a flag, and the reasons for choosing them cannot be fixed with certainty. The leading theories are the ribbon of the Spanish Order of Charles III, a Bourbon emblem; the then-unofficial arms of Buenos Aires, where blue stood for the sky and silver, later white, for the waters of the Río de la Plata; and the plume worn by the Patricios regiment during the British invasions of 1806 and 1807.
The Bourbon reading fits the politics of the moment. After 1810 the revolutionary government in Buenos Aires claimed to rule in the name of King Ferdinand VII, then a prisoner of Napoleon. A flag in Bourbon colours could signal self-government while keeping up the formal tie to a captive king, and historians still argue whether that loyalty was real or a cover for independence.
The Sun of May (Sol de Mayo) is named after the May Revolution of 25 May 1810. It reproduces the sun stamped on Argentina’s first coin, the eight-escudo piece approved in 1813, and has 16 straight and 16 wavy rays around a face. The historian Diego Abad de Santillán argued that it represents Inti, the Inca sun god. Rules from 1978 set its colour as golden yellow, with an inner diameter of 10 cm and an outer diameter of 25 cm on a standard flag.
Argentina has two equally national versions. The flag with the sun is the Bandera Oficial de Ceremonia, the official ceremonial flag, which serves as the state, civil and war flag. The plain triband without the sun is the Bandera de Ornato, the ornamental flag, and must always fly below the ceremonial one. The official proportions have been 5:8 since the national standards institute IRAM fixed them in 2002 (they had been 9:14 from 1978), and a presidential decree of November 2010 standardised the exact colours.
Manuel Belgrano and the Cockade of February 1812
Manuel Belgrano was born in Buenos Aires on 3 June 1770, the son of an Italian merchant, and studied in Spain at the time of the French Revolution. Back in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata from 1794, he became an economist, journalist and supporter of free trade, and he backed the May Revolution that removed Viceroy Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros on 25 May 1810. In the War of Independence he went on to command the Army of the North.
The flag grew out of a smaller symbol. Patriot troops were still fighting under flags that looked like those of the royalist enemy, which Belgrano saw as a practical danger. At his urging, the First Triumvirate decreed on 18 February 1812 that the national cockade of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata would be white and light blue. On 26 February Belgrano wrote to the government proposing that the flags carried by patriot forces should match the new cockade.
27 February 1812: The Batería Independencia at Rosario
Belgrano did not wait for an answer. The next day, 27 February 1812, he inaugurated an artillery battery named Independencia on Espinillo Island in the Paraná, opposite Rosario, and presented the new flag to his troops. Local tradition holds that it was sewn by María Catalina Echevarría de Vidal and raised by Cosme Maciel, a civilian sailor. Belgrano had the soldiers swear to defeat their enemies and cry “Long live the Fatherland!” In a letter sent the same day, he described the flag as white and light blue. He first gave the site as the Libertad battery, then corrected himself in July: it had flown at Independencia, on the island, not at the unfinished Libertad.
The exact layout of that first flag is still debated. Because Belgrano named the white first, some historians think it had just two stripes, white above light blue. The government in Buenos Aires was not pleased either way. In early March 1812 the Triumvirate, still acting in Ferdinand VII’s name, ordered him to put the flag away. Belgrano, by then marching with the Army of the North, did not receive the order. On 25 May 1812, the revolution’s second anniversary, Canon Juan Ignacio Gorriti blessed the flag in the cathedral of San Salvador de Jujuy and Belgrano called it the “national flag”, earning a reprimand from the government.
The Army of the North kept using it anyway, at the victory of Tucumán on 24 September 1812. On 13 February 1813, after crossing the Salado River, Belgrano’s troops swore obedience to the Assembly of the Year XIII under the blue-and-white flag, and the Assembly went on to allow it as a war flag. It flew again at Salta on 20 February 1813, after which it flew from the balcony of Salta’s Cabildo. After the army’s defeat at Ayohuma in November 1813, two of its flags were hidden in a chapel in the village of Macha, in present-day Bolivia. They were found by accident in 1885. One is now in the National Historical Museum in Buenos Aires; the other is kept at the Casa de la Libertad in Sucre.
Tucumán 1816 and the Sun of 1818
The Congress of Tucumán declared independence on 9 July 1816, and on 20 July 1816 it formally adopted Belgrano’s light blue and white flag as the symbol of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. Spanish flags were abolished. The congress later moved to Buenos Aires, and early in 1818 the version with the golden Sun of May was approved; the decree of 1944 that still defines the official flag dates that approval by the congress to 25 February 1818.
The new flag travelled quickly. The privateer Hipólito Bouchard sailed under it from 9 July 1817 on a two-year voyage that took him to the Makassar Strait and up the Pacific coast to Monterey in California. Manuel José Arce later used it in Central America, where it became the basis for the flag of the United Provinces of Central America. Across the Río de la Plata, José Gervasio Artigas added red stripes to Belgrano’s design for his League of the Free Peoples in 1814 and 1815, and the blue-and-white pattern lives on across the river in the banner explained in our guide to the flag of Uruguay.
At home the flag was contested for decades. Juan Manuel de Rosas, ruling from Buenos Aires from 1829, darkened the blue and in 1836 added a Phrygian cap in each of the four corners and turned the sun red; the darker blue was partly meant to set his federalists apart from their light-blue Unitarian opponents. Justo José de Urquiza restored the light blue after defeating Rosas at Caseros on 3 February 1852. Later rules settled who could fly what: President José Evaristo Uriburu fixed light blue and white as the official colours in 1895, decrees of 1943 and 1944 kept the sun flag for governments only, and Law 23,208 of 1985 gave every citizen the right to fly the official flag with the sun.
Flag Day on 20 June
Argentina celebrates its flag not on the day it was created but on the day its creator died. Belgrano died in Buenos Aires on 20 June 1820, and on 8 June 1938 President Roberto Ortiz signed Law 12,361 declaring 20 June the Día de la Bandera, a national holiday. Since 2011 a national decree has made it a fixed holiday, held on 20 June whatever the weekday. In schools across the country the day is also when pupils in the fourth grade of primary school make the Promesa de Lealtad, a public promise of loyalty to the flag.
The main ceremony takes place in Rosario, where the president usually attends alongside provincial and city officials, and the parade includes the armed forces, police, veterans of the Malvinas War and civic groups. In recent years Rosario has also paraded a community-made flag, billed as the world’s longest, sewn by local residents.
The Monumento a la Bandera on the Paraná
The National Flag Memorial, the Monumento Nacional a la Bandera, stands on the Rosario bank of the Paraná, facing the island where Belgrano first raised the flag. It was inaugurated on 20 June 1957, Flag Day, in a ceremony presided over by the de facto president Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. The complex covers about 10,000 square metres and was built largely from Andean stone under the architects Ángel Guido and Alejandro Bustillo, with sculpture by José Fioravanti, Alfredo Bigatti and Eduardo Barnes.
It has three parts. The Tower, 70 metres tall, represents the May Revolution of 1810. The Patio Cívico, or Civic Courtyard, stands for the effort of organising the state and is used for mass open-air events. The Propileo Triunfal, the Triumphal Propylaeum, represents the nation organised under the 1853 Constitution, and beneath it the Hall of Honour displays the flags of all the countries of the Americas. Visitors reach it along the Pasaje Juramento, the Oath Passage, lined with statues by the sculptor Lola Mora, from Plaza 25 de Mayo and the cathedral. The memorial marked its 50th anniversary in 2007 with a new lighting system, and one of its flagpoles is usually left empty so that it can fly the flags of other nations on their national days, especially those with large immigrant communities in Argentina, such as Italy and Japan.
Belgrano’s flag is only one of the country’s emblems. The animal Argentines chose more than a century later is the subject of our page on the national animal of Argentina, while Buenos Aires, the city where Belgrano was born and died, has its own guide as the capital of Argentina.