Cape Verde Emoji

The Cape Verde flag emoji 🇨🇻 shows the flag adopted in 1992: a deep blue field crossed below the middle by white, red and white stripes, with a circle of ten yellow stars ⭐ standing for the ten islands of the archipelago. The blue is the Atlantic and the sky around the islands; the stripes are usually explained as the road to building the nation, with white for peace and red for effort. To write it in the flag's colours, people paste 💙🤍❤️💛 after the flag.

From independence in 1975 until 1992 the country used a different flag, in red, yellow and green with a black star, close to the flag of Guinea-Bissau, because both countries came out of the same independence movement. There is no emoji for that older flag.

Like every country flag emoji, 🇨🇻 is not a picture in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇨 + 🇻, spelling the country code CV. Phones and Macs draw the pair as the flag. Windows does not include country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC the Cape Verde flag emoji appears as the letters 'CV'; the people you send it to on iPhone or Android still see the real flag.

Island emoji: Fogo, Sal, Boa Vista and the sea

Cape Verde is ten volcanic islands 🏝️ off the coast of West Africa 🌍, nine of them inhabited; little Santa Luzia has no permanent residents. Generic landscape and nature emoji can represent the islands. Fogo is the volcano 🌋: Pico do Fogo, the country's highest peak at about 2,829 m, last erupted in 2014–2015, and in the crater below it people of Chã das Caldeiras grow grapes for wine 🍷, and Fogo is also known for its coffee ☕. Santo Antão is green mountains ⛰️ and terraced valleys with bananas 🍌 and mangoes 🥭.

Sal is named after its salt 🧂, once dug at Pedra de Lume inside an old crater, and today it is beaches 🏖️, sun ☀️ and steady trade winds 🌬️ that bring kitesurfers 🪁 and surfers 🏄. Boa Vista adds desert-like dunes 🏜️, and its beaches are one of the world's biggest nesting places of the loggerhead turtle 🐢. Humpback whales 🐋 come to the warm waters in spring, and divers 🤿 meet dolphins 🐬, sharks 🦈, octopus 🐙 and reef fish 🐠.

Life between the islands runs on the sea: fishing boats 🎣🐟, ferries ⛴️ and sailing yachts ⛵ in Mindelo's deep harbour ⚓ on São Vicente, and short flights ✈️ between the islands. Goats 🐐 and donkeys 🫏 are everyday sights in the dry countryside.

Morna, funaná and carnival: Cape Verde music emoji

Music is the strongest thing Cape Verdeans share with the world. 🎶🎤 stands for morna, the slow, longing song of the islands, carried by guitar 🎸 and the small four-string cavaquinho; UNESCO added morna to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2019. Its great voice was Cesária Évora of Mindelo, the 'Barefoot Diva', whose song 'Sodade' made the Kriolu word for longing known far beyond the islands.

🪗🥁💃🕺 is the dance floor: funaná from Santiago is fast and played on the accordion with an iron scraper called the ferrinho, coladeira is quicker and lighter than morna, and batuku is sung and drummed by women. 🎭🪶🥁🎉 is the carnival of Mindelo, the biggest in the country, with costumed groups, feathers and drums in February or March, and 🎶🏖️ the Baía das Gatas festival held on a São Vicente beach every August.

Cachupa, grogue and Cape Verdean food emoji

🍲🌽🫘 is cachupa, the national dish: hominy corn and beans cooked slowly with fish 🐟 or meat and vegetables. Cachupa rica has more meat, cachupa pobre is the simpler everyday version, and the next morning the leftovers are fried and served with an egg 🍳.

🥃 is grogue, the sugarcane spirit distilled above all on Santo Antão, and 🍹 pontche, grogue sweetened into a smooth liqueur. Fogo adds its own goat cheese 🧀, wine 🍷 and coffee ☕, and the sea brings lobster 🦞, octopus 🐙 and tuna. Tropical fruit such as mango 🥭, banana 🍌 and coconut 🥥 grows in the greener valleys.

Blue Sharks, independence and Cape Verdean pride emoji

The national football team are the Blue Sharks, Tubarões Azuis, so fans send 🇨🇻⚽🦈💙. In 2025 the team qualified for the 2026 FIFA World Cup 🏆, its first ever, making Cape Verde one of the smallest countries ever to reach the tournament.

Independence Day on 5 July marks independence from Portugal in 1975 and is celebrated with 🇨🇻🎉🎆. Most Cape Verdeans are Catholic ✝️ ⛪, and saints' days such as São João in June are big local festivals with drums and dancing.

Cape Verde has a large diaspora, often said to be bigger than the population at home, in New England in the United States, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and elsewhere; the link to Massachusetts and Rhode Island goes back to the whaling ships of the 19th century. That is why so many bios read 🇨🇻🇺🇸 or 🇨🇻🇵🇹, and why ✈️🇨🇻❤️ means going home.

Escudo sign and Portuguese letters: how to type them

The Cape Verdean escudo (CVE) is written with the cifrão, a dollar-like sign that sits where other currencies put the decimal point: 1$00 is one escudo, 2.500$00 is two thousand five hundred. Unicode has no separate cifrão, so it is typed as the ordinary $ sign; it is often drawn with two vertical strokes. The escudo is pegged to the euro at 110.265 escudos per euro, and € is commonly seen in tourist areas.

Portuguese is the official language, used in school, government and the press, and Cape Verdean Creole, Kabuverdianu or simply Kriolu, is the first language of virtually all Cape Verdeans; CLDR estimates about 556,000 Kriolu speakers and about 464,000 Portuguese speakers in a population of about 610,000. Portuguese needs the letters á à â ã ç é ê í ó ô õ ú, all in the grid, and our Portuguese and Kabuverdianu collections cover each language in full. Kriolu is also written in its own official spelling, ALUPEC, which uses k and x where Portuguese uses c, qu and ch, and digraphs such as dj, tx and nh.

To type them on Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: ã Alt+0227, ç Alt+0231, é Alt+0233, ê Alt+0234, ó Alt+0243, õ Alt+0245 (capitals: Ã Alt+0195, Ç Alt+0199). On a Mac, Option+E then a vowel gives the acute (á é í ó ú), Option+N then a or o gives ã õ, Option+I gives the circumflex and Option+C gives ç. On a phone, press and hold the letter and slide to the accented form.