Flag of Balearic Islands

The flag of the Balearic Islands carries the four red bars on yellow and, in the corner, a white castle on purple. It has been official since the 1983 Statute of Autonomy. Its purple colour, however, still raises eyebrows.

How it came about

In 1907 the Palma city council wanted to hang a ‘Mallorcan flag’ on the balcony. It commissioned a report from the city chronicler Benet Pons i Fàbregues, who proposed the four bars with a purple stripe and a castle. He based it on a document of 1312 by King Sancho of Majorca.

With the arrival of autonomy, some wanted the four bars with nothing else and others wanted Pons’s flag. In 1979 the Consell General Interinsular, the provisional government of the islands, entrusted the decision to four experts: Maria Barceló and Gabriel Llompart, from Majorca, Joan Marí, from Ibiza, and Joan Hernández, from Menorca. They proposed Pons’s, and the Statute approved it in 1983 with one change: the castle, upright inside a quarter.

How it has changed

Before being the flag of all the islands, the castle went through several drawings.

1. 

   14th-19th centuries

   The arms of the city of Majorca, today’s Palma: four quarters, with the castle on blue and the bars of the king.

2. 

   1907-1983

   Benet Pons’s proposal: a purple stripe next to the flagpole with the castle lying down. It was used as a regionalist flag, above all during the Second Republic.

3. 

   1983

   The Statute of Autonomy sets the castle upright in a purple quarter.

What it means

The flag brings together two signals from the Middle Ages.

• Four red bars on yellow

  the signal of the Kings of Aragon, who conquered Majorca in 1229.

• Five-towered castle

  the castle of the Almudaina, the royal palace of Palma. It already appeared on the seal that King James I gave the city in 1269.

• Purple

  it comes from the document of 1312, which speaks of a white castle on a ‘livid’ colour.

Fun facts

1. The purple may have been blue

   The document of 1312 says ‘livid’, a doubtful Latin word. Benet Pons translated it as purple, but the city’s old coats of arms always paint the castle on blue. The philologist Gabriel Bibiloni calls the purple flag a ‘myth’.

2. Majorca kept the lying castle

   After 1983 the Mallorca council recovered Pons’s flag, with the castle lying down on a stripe, and today it is the island’s flag. They are so alike that it is easy to confuse them.

3. In 1978 it looked like the four bars were winning

   On 28 July 1978, at the ceremony creating the Consell General Interinsular at the castle of Bellver, the flag of four bars flew at the same level as the Spanish one. In the end the castle flag was chosen.

4. Each island, its flag

   The Statute allows each island to have a flag of its own. Menorca preferred the four bars without the purple and added the emblem of its old Universitat General.

Location

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