The flag of Colombia is a horizontal tricolour of yellow, blue and red in which the yellow band fills the top half and the blue and red bands each take one quarter, a 2:1:1 split on a 2:3 rectangle. According to the Colombian government, yellow stands for the wealth of the soil, gold, sovereignty, harmony and justice, and the sun as the source of light; blue for the sky, the rivers and the two oceans on Colombia’s shores; and red for the blood spilled to win independence. Another popular reading makes blue loyalty and vigilance and red the victories of the independence battles. The colours go back to the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda, passed through Gran Colombia in 1819, and took their present arrangement by decree on 26 November 1861.
Colombians call it El Tricolor Nacional, and together with the coat of arms and the anthem, ¡Oh, Gloria Inmarcesible!, it is one of the country’s three official national symbols. The plain version is the national and civil flag anyone may fly; versions with the coat of arms are reserved for official and military use. Colombian law has never fixed the exact shades.
Francisco de Miranda’s Tricolour, 1801 to 1806
The design began with a man from Caracas, not Bogotá. Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816) had fought for Spain against the British at Pensacola during the American Revolutionary War, served as a French revolutionary general at Valmy, and spent decades lobbying European governments to back independence for Spanish America, a continent he liked to call “Colombia”. In 1801 he submitted a plan to the British cabinet for an army of liberation, and in it he asked for materials for ten flags in red, yellow and blue “in three zones”.
Miranda himself gave several sources for the colours. In a letter to the Russian count Semyon Vorontsov he described a late-night conversation with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at a party in Weimar in the winter of 1785, in which the German writer explained his theory of the three primary colours and told Miranda his destiny was to create a land where those colours were not distorted. Miranda also recalled a fresco by Lazzaro Tavarone in the Palazzo Belimbau in Genoa showing Christopher Columbus unfurling a similarly coloured banner at Veragua, and in his military diary he mentioned the yellow, blue and red standard of the Bürgerwache, Hamburg’s citizen guard.
What is certain is when the flag first flew. On 12 March 1806, during his expedition from New York, Miranda raised a yellow, blue and red flag on the brig Leander at Jacmel in Haiti. On 3 August that year it flew over Venezuelan soil at La Vela de Coro, though the expedition soon failed. When Venezuela declared independence, Miranda, Lino de Clemente and José de Sata y Bussy presented the arrangement to the Venezuelan Congress, which approved it in 1811. Venezuelans still call that design the Bandera Madre, the mother flag, because Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela all descend from it. Miranda died in 1816 in La Carraca prison, outside Cádiz.
Cartagena’s Star and the Provincial Flags of 1811 to 1815
Miranda’s tricolour took years to reach New Granada, as Colombia was then called. After 1810 the provinces of the Viceroyalty of New Granada broke from Spain separately, and each raised its own banner. The confederated cities of the Valle del Cauca chose sky blue and white in 1811. Antonio Nariño’s centralist State of Cundinamarca adopted sky blue, yellow and red on 7 August 1813, and the department of Cundinamarca still flies that tricolour today.
The most important of these early banners came from Cartagena de Indias. Its flag was three concentric rectangles, red outside, then yellow, then green, with a white eight-pointed star in the centre, made official on 21 January 1812. On 26 April 1814 the Congress of the United Provinces of New Granada adopted it provisionally for the whole union, which makes it the first flag that can be called national. A law of 14 July 1815 appears to have replaced it with three equal horizontal stripes of yellow, green and red.
Gran Colombia Adopts the Yellow, Blue and Red in 1819
The switch came with Simón Bolívar. He had carried Venezuela’s tricolour alongside New Granadan banners in his campaigns since 1813, and in 1819 he led a combined army of Venezuelans, New Granadans and a British Legion over the Andes. On 7 August 1819 that army defeated the Spanish column of Colonel José María Barreiro at the bridge of Boyacá, the victory that secured New Granada’s independence. Four months later, on 17 December 1819, the Congress of Angostura passed the Fundamental Law creating the Republic of Colombia, the state historians now call Gran Colombia, and adopted Miranda’s yellow, blue and red as its flag. The Congress of Cúcuta confirmed it on 12 July 1821.
The first official reading of the colours was a fiery one. At Angostura the New Granadan botanist and statesman Francisco Antonio Zea (1766–1822), later Bolívar’s vice-president, declared that yellow showed the peoples’ love of federation, blue the vast ocean separating them from Spain’s “ominous yoke”, and red their willingness to drown the tyrants in their own blood. That is the origin of the much-repeated saying that the flag shows the gold of America separated from bloody Spain by the sea. Colombia no longer uses Zea’s interpretation.
New Granada’s Vertical Tricolour, 1834 to 1861
Gran Colombia broke apart in 1830 and 1831 amid quarrels between centralists and federalists, and its three successors kept the shared colours for a while. Laws of 19 August 1830 in Ecuador, 14 October 1830 in Venezuela and 17 December 1831 in New Granada confirmed the old emblems until new ones could be agreed. New Granada then went its own way. Law 3 of 9 May 1834, signed by President Francisco de Paula Santander, made the national colours red, blue and yellow and turned the stripes vertical, red nearest the pole, blue in the centre and yellow at the fly, all of equal width.
That vertical flag lasted 27 years, through the federal Granadine Confederation from 1858. When General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera seized Bogotá in July 1861 and renamed the country the United States of New Granada, a decree of 26 July added white stars to the blue stripe, one for each federal state. It lasted four months.
Mosquera’s Decree of 26 November 1861
Mosquera, still provisional president, renamed the country again in late 1861 as the United States of Colombia, confirmed by the Rionegro Constitution of 1863. On 26 November 1861 he abolished every flag of New Granada and the Confederation and decreed the design Colombia flies today. Article 2 set out yellow, blue and red in horizontal stripes, with yellow occupying the upper half and the other two colours sharing the lower half in equal bands, blue in the centre and red at the bottom. This 2:1:1 layout sets Colombia’s flag apart from most tricolours.
The national flag has not changed since; only the versions bearing the coat of arms have. When the centralist Republic of Colombia replaced the federation in 1886, Decree 838 of 1889 removed the arms’ nine stars for the federal states and changed the inscription from “Estados Unidos de Colombia” to “República de Colombia”. The proportions of the flag itself were not fixed until Ministry of Defence Resolution 04235 of 1965, which set a hoisted national flag at 2 metres by 3 metres, or any size in the same 2:3 ratio. Decrees of 1924 and 1934 regulate the war flag, with the arms on a white disc ringed in red, and the merchant flag, which carries a white eight-pointed star in a red-bordered blue oval.
Ecuador and Venezuela: Colombia’s Sister Flags
All three successor states kept Gran Colombia’s colours, but each took its own route.
- Ecuador first adopted the tricolour by law in 1835, then switched to a white and blue design before Gabriel García Moreno restored yellow, blue and red on 26 September 1860, a date Ecuador still marks as its Flag Day. Its stripes follow the same 2:1:1 split as Colombia’s. Since 1900 the official flag has carried the coat of arms, with Mount Chimborazo and the Guayas River, in the centre. Ecuador’s plain merchant flag matches Colombia’s national flag in every respect, which is why the two are often confused.
- Venezuela kept Miranda’s original equal thirds. Seven white stars were added in the 19th century for the seven provinces that signed the 1811 declaration of independence, and in 2006 the government of Hugo Chávez added an eighth, following Bolívar’s Angostura decree of 20 November 1817, for the province of Guayana. The stars sit on the blue stripe, and the state version adds the coat of arms in the upper hoist corner. Venezuela celebrates Flag Day on 3 August, the anniversary of the landing at La Vela de Coro.
In short: equal stripes and stars mean Venezuela; a broad yellow half with a central coat of arms means Ecuador; a plain broad yellow half is almost always Colombia. For a closer look at the neighbours, see the guides to the flag of Ecuador and the flag of Venezuela.
Decree 1967 of 1991 and Flag Day on 7 August
By law, public buildings, schools and universities, and military and police posts must fly the flag permanently at their main entrance, and homes as well as public and private buildings are expected to fly it during national and municipal holidays. Embassies and consulates abroad must display it in a visible place. The ceremonial protocol is set by Decree 1967 of 15 August 1991, which also regulates the presidential standard. Among its provisions:
- The flag stands on the right of whoever presides over a ceremony, which is the left as seen by the audience.
- It must never touch the ground, and a faded or torn flag may not be used.
- Only the Ministry of Defence can order the flag to half-mast.
- In a group of national flags, Colombia’s goes in the centre and the others follow in Spanish alphabetical order, alternating right and left, all at the same height.
Colombia has a Flag Day too. Law 28 of 1925, promoted by former president Pedro Nel Ospina, made 7 August the Fiesta Nacional de la Bandera, so the flag is honoured on the anniversary of the Battle of Boyacá, already a public holiday. The date has another link to the tricolour: Colombian presidents are sworn in on 7 August and wear a sash in the same colours and order, the yellow wider than the blue and red, with the coat of arms. To see how the flag fits with the rest of the country’s story, from the Andes to the Caribbean coast, read our Colombia country guide.