Bolivia Emoji & Symbols

The Bolivia flag emoji 🇧🇴 shows the horizontal tricolour of red, yellow and green, adopted in 1851. The colours are usually explained as the blood of the country's heroes, its mineral wealth and the richness of its land. The state flag adds the coat of arms in the yellow band, but the emoji, like most flag emoji, draws the plain version. 17 August is Flag Day.

Behind the scenes 🇧🇴 is two regional indicator letters, 🇧 and 🇴, the country code BO. Phones and Macs join them into a flag; Windows has no country flags in its emoji font and shows the letters BO instead. When the flag will not show, Bolivians type the colours: ❤️💛💚 or 🔴🟡🟢 often turns up in comment sections on match days and around 6 August.

The 2009 constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia names the wiphala as a national symbol beside the tricolour: a square flag of seven colours (red, orange, yellow, white, green, blue and violet) set out in a chequered grid, the emblem of the Andean peoples. It flies next to the tricolour on public buildings. Unicode has no wiphala emoji, so people paste the squares 🟥🟧🟨⬜🟩🟦🟪 or a 🌈. The 🏳️‍🌈 rainbow flag is the pride flag, a different flag with six stripes, and is best not used for the wiphala.

Bolivia national symbols: condor, llama, kantuta

The coat of arms puts an Andean condor (shown here with the 🦅 eagle emoji), the national bird, on top of an oval showing the Cerro Rico of Potosí ⛰️ under a rising sun 🌞, an alpaca 🦙, a breadfruit tree and a sheaf of wheat. The 🦙 emoji covers llamas and alpacas alike, the herd animals of the Altiplano whose wool becomes the striped aguayo cloth 🧶 that women carry their babies and their shopping in.

The constitution also names two national flowers, the kantuta of the Andes and the patujú of the eastern lowlands; both have varieties in the flag's own red, yellow and green. There is no emoji for either, and 🌺 is the usual stand-in. The full list of national symbols is the tricolour, the anthem, the coat of arms, the wiphala, the cockade and the two flowers.

La Paz, Uyuni and Titicaca emoji

La Paz, the seat of government (Sucre is the constitutional capital), fills a canyon under the snowy Illimani 🏔️, and since 2014 its neighbourhoods and El Alto on the plateau above have been joined by Mi Teleférico, the largest urban cable car network in the world: 🚡🚠 for the coloured cabins, 🌄 for the view at dawn. 🚵 is the Yungas "Death Road" that mountain bikers ride down from the pass to Coroico, and 🧗 the climbs of Huayna Potosí, where the cholita climbers go up in their skirts.

The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat on Earth, around 10,000 square kilometres: 🧂🏜️ for the white crust, 🚙 for the four-by-four tours, 🚂 for the rusting train cemetery outside town, 🦩 for the flamingos of Laguna Colorada and 🌋 for the volcanoes along the border with Chile. In the rainy season a film of water turns the flat into a mirror of the sky. Under it lie some of the world's largest lithium deposits 🔋.

Lake Titicaca, shared with Peru, gets 🛶 for its reed boats, 🐟 for the trout served at Copacabana and 🌞 for Isla del Sol, where Inca legend places the birth of the sun. ⚓ is the Bolivian Navy, which trains on the lake: the country lost its coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific, and 23 March, the Day of the Sea, is still marked every year. ⛏️ stands for the silver mines of Potosí's Cerro Rico and 🪨 for the carved stones of Tiwanaku. East of the Andes most of the country is lowland forest and savanna: 🌳🐒🦜🐆🦥🐊🦋, and 🐬 for the pink river dolphins of the Beni.

Bolivian food emoji: salteñas, silpancho, api

The salteña 🥟 is Bolivia's mid-morning ritual: a baked, slightly sweet pastry filled with a juicy stew of meat, potato, olive and egg, eaten upright so the broth stays inside, with 🌶️ llajwa, the fresh tomato and locoto chili salsa that goes on almost everything. At night street stalls grill 🍢 anticuchos, skewers of beef heart with potatoes and peanut sauce.

From Cochabamba come silpancho, rice and potatoes under a thin breaded beef cutlet with a fried egg on top (🍚🥔🥩🍳), and pique macho, a heap of beef, sausage, fries, onion and locoto (🥩🌭🍟🌶️). 🍲 covers sopa de maní 🥜, the peanut soup, and the highland stews thickened with chuño, potatoes freeze-dried in the frost of the Altiplano. 🌽 is everywhere, from mote to api morado, the hot purple corn drink served with a fried cheese pastel. 🌾 stands for quinoa, grown around the Uyuni salt flat; 🍌 for the plantains of the lowlands; 🌰 for Brazil nuts, which Bolivia exports more of than any other country; 🧀🍞 for cuñapé, the cheese bread of Santa Cruz; 🍫 for the chocolate makers of Sucre.

Drinks: 🍵🌿 mate de coca, the coca-leaf tea offered to visitors against altitude sickness (chewing coca leaf is an old Andean custom protected as cultural heritage by the constitution); 🍺 a Paceña; 🍇🍷 the wines of Tarija, from some of the highest vineyards in the world; 🥃 singani, the grape brandy of the southern valleys.

Bolivia holidays, Carnival and music emoji

The Carnival of Oruro, proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2001, is danced for hours through the city by troupes of the diablada, with horned devil masks 👹, the morenada and the caporales: 👹🎭💃🕺. Independence Day is 6 August, the day in 1825 when independence was declared; the new republic took its name from Simón Bolívar: 🇧🇴🎆🎉 and ¡Viva Bolivia!

On 24 January La Paz opens the Alasitas fair of the Ekeko, the little god of abundance, where people buy miniatures of what they wish for in the coming year (a house 🏠, a car, tiny banknotes 💰) and have them blessed; the fair opens at noon on 24 January, the traditional moment for the blessing. On 21 June the Aymara New Year is greeted at Tiwanaku with raised palms catching the first rays of the sun: 🌅🙌. At Todos Santos, 1 and 2 November, families set out bread, flowers and candles for their dead 🕯️🌼, and on 8 November La Paz holds the Fiesta de las Ñatitas, when skulls 💀 kept at home are crowned with flowers and taken to the General Cemetery to be blessed. ⛪✝️🙏 belong to the Virgin of Copacabana and to the many saints' day fiestas.

The music: 🎸 for the charango, the small ten-string Andean guitar once made from an armadillo shell; 🪈 for the quena and the zampoña pan pipes; 🥁 for the bombo; 🎻 for the baroque violins of the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos, whose festival plays music kept in the mission archives. 🎩👗 are the bowler hat and full pollera skirt of the cholita, worn with pride, and 🤼 the cholita wrestlers of El Alto. In sport ⚽ comes first: Bolivia won the Copa América at home in 1963 (🏆), and the Hernando Siles stadium 🏟️ in La Paz, about 3,600 metres up, is famous for its 6–1 win over Argentina in 2009.

Boliviano symbol Bs and how to type the letters of Bolivia

Bolivia's currency is the boliviano (BOB), written Bs or Bs. before the amount: Bs 50. There is no Unicode character for it, so type the two letters or copy Bs from the combos below. The boliviano arrived in 1987, replacing the peso boliviano at one million to one after the hyperinflation of the mid-1980s. US dollars ($ 💵) are quoted for cars, rents and imports, and money changers (💱) on the street swap them.

Spanish is spoken by most Bolivians, about 7.5 million in CLDR's estimate, Quechua by nearly 4 million, Aymara by about 2.5 million and Guarani by some 55,000 in the Chaco; the constitution makes Spanish and 36 indigenous languages official. Spanish brings ñ, the acute accents á é í ó ú, ü (as in pingüino) and the opening ¿ and ¡. Quechua and Aymara both use ñ and write their ejective consonants with an apostrophe (ch' k' p' q' t'), properly ʼ, as in t'ant'a, bread, the word inside the t'antawawa bread figures of Todos Santos; Aymara writes long vowels with a diaeresis: ä ï ü. Our Spanish, Quechua, Aymara and Guarani collections have the full alphabets, and the Peru collection the other shore of Titicaca.

On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0241 for ñ, 0209 Ñ, 0225 á, 0233 é, 0237 í, 0243 ó, 0250 ú, 0252 ü, 0228 ä, 0239 ï, 0191 ¿ and 0161 ¡. On a Mac, Option + N then N gives ñ, Option + E then a vowel the acute, Option + U then a vowel ä ï ü, Option + 1 ¡ and Option + Shift + ? ¿. On a phone, long-press N for ñ and a vowel for its accents. ʼ has no simple key; copy it from this page or use ʼ in HTML. On iPhone or Android, search "Bolivia" in the emoji keyboard; on a Mac, press Ctrl + Cmd + Space, then search for Bolivia, or copy 🇧🇴 from here. The Windows emoji picker has no national flag emoji, and Windows displays BO instead.