Eight blue and yellow stripes crossed by a saltire: the flag of Alaior copies an old standard that tradition links to the fight against the pirates.
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It is a rectangular field with a 2:3 ratio divided into eight equal horizontal stripes alternating bluish green and yellow. On top of it is a saltire, a cross in the shape of an X that runs from corner to corner.
Each element and how many of the 1,390 flags in the catalogue carry it. In yellow, the rarest.
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According to tradition, in 1644 Berber pirates landed on the north coast of Menorca
The town council took that standard as a model and approved it as the municipal flag in 1987
How it was born, how it has changed and what it means.
The flag of Alaior, a village in the centre of Menorca, has eight blue and yellow stripes crossed by a saltire. The people of Alaior call it ‘bandera d’en Barçola’, because it copies an old standard that is still preserved.
According to tradition, in 1644 Berber pirates landed on the north coast of Menorca, and the mayor of Alaior, Miquel Barçola i Cardona, came out to defend the village with his standard and died of his wounds. There are no documents of the time telling of these events, but the standard does exist and the story became very popular.
The town council took that standard as a model and approved it as the municipal flag in 1987.
It has not changed since 1987.
No official meaning is known for the colours or the saltire.
When the old standard was restored in 2010 it turned out that its colours were an intense yellow and a very dark Prussian blue, and that the saltire was an oxidised red, not yellow.
The restoration opened a debate in the Menorcan press: some recalled that the standard had belonged to a large landowner, not to the whole village.
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How many people live there, how big it is and what borders it.
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Text based on the article “Alaior (Viquipèdia)” from the Spanish Wikipedia, published under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources consulted:
Flag image: Erlenmeyer, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0.
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