The flag of Chile has two equal horizontal bands, white over red, with a blue square in the upper hoist corner holding a single white five-pointed star. Chileans call it La Estrella Solitaria, “the Lone Star”. The usual official meaning is that the blue stands for the sky and the Pacific Ocean, the white for the snow of the Andes, the red for the blood shed to win independence, and the star for a guide to progress and honour; many accounts link the star to Venus, the morning star of the Mapuche people. The flag was made official by decree on 18 October 1817, during the war of independence against Spain, which makes it 22 years older than the similar Lone Star Flag of Texas.
The geometry is fixed by law. The flag is 3:2, the blue canton is a square exactly as tall as the white band, and the canton and the white rectangle beside it stand in a length ratio of 1:2. The star sits in the centre of the canton and is drawn on a circle whose diameter is half the side of the square. Oddly, the exact shades are not defined: the law names only “turquí blue”, white and red.
18 October 1817: Zenteno, Arcos and a Decree No One Has Found
The current design came out of the Patria Nueva, the period that began when the Army of the Andes under José de San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins beat the royalists at Chacabuco on 12 February 1817. O’Higgins became Supreme Director and the patriots needed a flag of their own. The design is usually credited to his Minister of War, José Ignacio Zenteno, and said to have been drawn by a Spanish soldier serving the patriots, Antonio Arcos. Some historians argue instead that it was drawn by Gregorio de Andía y Varela. The decree making it official is dated 18 October 1817, but no copy of it survives; historians know of it only through indirect references.
The flag’s public debut came four months later. On 12 February 1818, the first anniversary of Chacabuco, Chile formally swore its independence, and the new flag was carried at the oath ceremony by Tomás Guido. The first version was more elaborate than today’s. Its proportions followed the golden ratio, the star was tilted slightly toward the pole, the national coat of arms was printed in the centre, and an eight-pointed asterisk sat inside the star as a nod to the Mapuche morning-star symbol. These details proved hard to reproduce, and the coat of arms and asterisk were soon dropped and the star set upright.
The flag used at that ceremony still exists. It was kept for generations by Chilean institutions until 1980, when members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) stole it in protest against the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. They returned it in late 2003, and it is now displayed at the National Historical Museum in Santiago.
Before the Lone Star: Javiera Carrera’s 1812 Tricolour and the Transition Flag
Under Spanish rule Chile had no flag of its own. Colonial forts and ships flew Spanish symbols, often the red saltire of the Cross of Burgundy and, after 1785, the red-and-yellow naval flag that resembles Spain’s modern one. The first government junta was formed on 18 September 1810, still in the name of the captive King Ferdinand VII, so its symbols remained Spanish.
The break came under José Miguel Carrera. According to tradition his sister, Javiera Carrera, embroidered a new flag, first raised on 4 July 1812 at a dinner with the United States consul Joel Roberts Poinsett to mark American independence. This flag of the Patria Vieja (“Old Fatherland”) had three horizontal stripes of blue, white and yellow. Some read them as the three powers of government; others as sky, Andean snow and golden wheat. A coat of arms was added that September, and some versions put the stripes in a different order or carried the red Cross of Santiago, a symbol taken from Spanish booty after the patriot victory at El Roble in 1813.
The tricolour had a short, broken life. The Treaty of Lircay on 3 May 1814 restored Spanish sovereignty and the Spanish flag. Carrera took power again on 23 July 1814 and brought the tricolour back, but the royalist victory at Rancagua on 1–2 October 1814 began the three-year Reconquista. At Chacabuco in 1817 the patriots fought under the flag of the Army of the Andes, modelled on Argentina’s, not under the blue-white-yellow banner.
A second national flag followed in 1817, now called the Flag of the Transition. Credited at the time to Juan Gregorio de Las Heras, it had three equal stripes of blue, white and red; red replaced yellow to stand for blood shed in the war. It was never made law and vanished after about five months, partly because it was too easily confused with the Dutch flag and the French tricolour. It was last unfurled at a ceremony marking the anniversary of Rancagua, two weeks before the lone-star flag was adopted.
The Star of Arauco and Alonso de Ercilla’s Mapuche Colours
The colours and the star both have roots in the Mapuche, the people of central-southern Chile who resisted Spanish rule for centuries. The earliest known reference to Mapuche warriors using blue, white and red is in Canto XXI of La Araucana, the epic poem Alonso de Ercilla published in 1569 about the Arauco War. The colours of the 1817 flags are traditionally traced to Ercilla’s description of those warriors.
The star has a similar story. O’Higgins called it the Star of Arauco. In Mapuche iconography the morning star, Venus, was called Wünelfe or, in Hispanicised form, Guñelve, and drawn as an eight-pointed star or a leafy cross; a Mapuche flag with a white star on a blue field is first mentioned in 1839, already described as an old symbol. Whether the Guñelve directly inspired the Chilean star is a theory, not a documented fact, but the asterisk once placed inside the five-pointed star shows the designers wanted to combine European and indigenous symbols. Another common reading treats the star as the sign of a single, independent state.
Chile also has a well-loved legend that its flag won a “most beautiful flag in the world” contest, usually placed in 1907 at Blankenberge, Belgium. No reliable record of such a contest exists, and the only documented telling puts Blankenberge on the Baltic Sea, when it is in fact on the North Sea.
Law No. 2,597, Supreme Decree 1,534 and the 9 July Flag Day
The modern rules built up over a century. In 1854 the proportions were revised to make the canton a square and set the 2:3 proportions. Law No. 2,597 of 11 January 1912 fixed the diameter of the star and the order of colours on the presidential sash and the cockade: blue, white and red. A decree of 26 August 1927 set the sizes of flags on public buildings. All of this was consolidated in Supreme Decree No. 1,534 of the Ministry of the Interior in 1967, under President Eduardo Frei Montalva, which still governs the flag, the coat of arms, the cockade and the presidential standard.
The rules on display are strict on paper. Article 22 of the 1980 Constitution says all inhabitants owe respect to Chile and its national emblems, and the State Security Act (Decree 890 of 1975) makes it a crime to publicly mistreat the flag. Until October 2011 a private citizen technically needed the provincial governor’s permission to fly it, except during the 2010 bicentennial, though the rule was rarely enforced. Every building, public or private, must fly the flag on Navy Day (21 May), National Day (18 September) and Army Day (19 September), or face a fine. The protocol for poles is just as precise: the flag flies from the tip of a white mast, no accompanying flag may be larger, and it is the first flag raised and the last lowered.
Chile’s Flag Day falls on 9 July. It commemorates the Battle of La Concepción, fought on 9 and 10 July 1882 during the War of the Pacific, when a Chilean detachment of 77 men under Captain Ignacio Carrera Pinto was wiped out after a 27-hour fight against a far larger Peruvian force in the town of Concepción in the Peruvian Andes. On that date the Juramento a la Bandera, the oath to the flag, is recited at every Chilean Army base and installation.
Texas in 1839, Cuba in 1868 and Other Lone-Star Lookalikes
The flag most often confused with Chile’s is the Lone Star Flag of Texas, which is also nicknamed “the Lone Star”. The Texan flag was adopted by the Congress of the Republic of Texas on 25 January 1839, 22 years after Chile’s, and it differs in layout: its blue band runs the full height of the hoist, while Chile’s blue is only a square in the corner above a red stripe that runs the full length. Historians do not regard either as a copy of the other; one author suggests both were drawn to look like the United States flag from a distance at sea. Because there is no Texas flag emoji, Texans often use the Chilean one, and in 2017 Texas state representative Tom Oliverson introduced a resolution urging people to stop.
Chile’s flag did inspire others. In 1822 the Chilean and Peruvian armies of the Liberating Expedition of Peru used a version with three stars in the canton for the United Provinces, Chile and Peru. In 1868 Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, launching Cuba’s Ten Years’ War, raised the La Demajagua flag, which reversed the blue and red and stretched the canton to the middle of the flag; his son later said he had modelled it on Chile’s colours. The flag of Malacca in Malaysia shares the colours and the corner canton too. All of these belong to the wider family of stars-and-stripes designs covered in our guide to flags with stars.
The lone star still flies where its colours come from: over the long Pacific coast and beneath the Andes snowline described in our overview of Chile’s geography, and, for comparison, over the plains and hills of the state in our guide to Texas geography.