A snake, a hand and the senyera: the flag that circulates as that of Manlleu mixes the legend of the Serpent with the coat of arms of the town, but it is not official.
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 divided into two almost equal horizontal stripes.
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.
What is official is the coat of arms: an open golden left hand on red, approved on 29 April 1982
The image that spreads it on the internet, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 2015, is described…
How it was born, how it has changed and what it means.
Manlleu is a town in the comarca of Osona, in Catalonia, on the river Ter. The flag that usually circulates as its own is blue on top, with a snake and a hand, and carries at the bottom the red and yellow bars of the senyera.
No official approval of this flag by the Generalitat de Catalunya has been found. The image that spreads it on the internet, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 2015, is described as a flag ‘inspired by’ the Serpent, the Manlleu hand and the Catalan flag.
What is official is the coat of arms: an open golden left hand on red, approved on 29 April 1982.
No other versions are known.
Snake
the Serpent of Manlleu, the monster of the town’s most famous legend.
Hand
it comes from the coat of arms. It is a ‘canting’ symbol, which plays with the name: Manlleu begins with ‘mà’, which in Catalan means hand.
Red and yellow bars
the senyera of Catalonia.
According to the legend, in the forest of the Devesa lived a snake with a mane and a great diamond on its head. A young man stole it and hid it under some mortar, and the snake died exhausted from squeezing it so hard.
The poet Jacint Verdaguer wrote down the story of the Serpent, which he knew from oral tradition, in the manuscripts of the Obra del Cançoner Popular.
On 14 August 2006 Manlleu put on a big show about the legend. Since then the Festa del Serpent has been part of its main festival, with a parade, fire and bread shaped like a snake.
Test what you have read about the flag of Manlleu.
Text based on the article “Bandera de Manlleu (Wikimedia Commons)” from the Spanish Wikipedia, published under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources consulted:
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