White, blue and gold with a red double-tailed lion: the flag of Limburg, in the south of the Netherlands, brings together the coats of arms of its old lordships.
Every fact about the flag, each with what it means.
Normal flagFIAV symbol: the form of the flag.
CivilFIAV symbol: who may fly the flag.YesIt carries the coat of arms on the cloth.The flag in the words of vexillology and heraldry.
It is a rectangular field with a 2:3 ratio with three horizontal stripes: white on top, blue in the middle and golden yellow below. The white and the yellow measure the same, two fifths of the height each; the blue, narrower, a fifth.
Each element and how many of the 1,390 flags in the catalogue carry it. In yellow, the rarest.
Every date in its story, at a glance.
Limburg asked for one of its own in 1885
The province completed it with the yellow and approved it on 28 July 1953
In 2005 only the exact tones of the colours were fixed
How it was born, how it has changed and what it means.
Limburg is the southernmost province of the Netherlands, that of Maastricht, wedged between Belgium and Germany. Its flag has three stripes, white, blue and yellow, and a large red lion with a crown and a split tail.
In the 19th century the Dutch provinces were only allowed to fly the national flag. Limburg asked for one of its own in 1885, red and white, and the government refused it several times.
The current one is based on a drawing by the Maastricht architect Louis Maris: a white flag with a blue stripe and the red lion. The province completed it with the yellow and approved it on 28 July 1953.
It has not changed since 1953. In 2005 only the exact tones of the colours were fixed.
Before the official one there was a forbidden flag and several rejected designs.
No oficial
Red and white, the colours of the old duchy of Limburg. The government forbade it, but it was used without permission until the Second World War.
Propuesta
The province’s first proposal combined red, white, blue, yellow and black, all the colours of the coat of arms. It was rejected because black did not seem Limburg enough.
Propuesta
Bishop Van Gils proposed a design with a cross. It was not chosen either.
The colours come from the coat of arms of the province, which brings together those of the old lordships of the area:
Red lion
that of the old duchy of Limburg. The crown and the double tail distinguish it from the Dutch lion.
White
the coats of arms of Limburg and Valkenburg.
Blue
the coat of arms of Guelders. Popularly, the river Meuse.
Yellow
the coats of arms of Horn, Guelders and Jülich.
There is also a reading of the landscape: white for the sand of the north, blue for the river clay and yellow for the loess, the fine soil of the southern hills.
The old duchy of Limburg, which the lion comes from, had almost no lands inside the present province: it lay mostly in today’s Belgium.
The red-and-white flag the government forbade had the same design as the flags of Monaco and Indonesia: a red stripe over a white one.
In Louis Maris’s drawing the bottom stripe was white. The province added the yellow.
The five-stripe proposal fell because black was not seen as a colour of the region, although it is on its coat of arms.
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Text based on the article “Vlag van Limburg (Nederland)” from the Spanish Wikipedia, published under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources consulted:
Flag image: Louis Maris, SVG by User:GeeKaa , and SVG revision bij User:D'Arch, Wikimedia Commons · Public domain.
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