Clipperton Island Emoji

🇨🇵 is the flag emoji for Clipperton Island. It is a flag sequence, not a stored picture: two regional indicator letters, 🇨 and 🇵, that spell the island's code CP; your phone or computer decides what to draw for the pair. Clipperton has no flag of its own. It belongs to France and flies the French flag, so Apple, Google, Samsung and the other emoji sets draw 🇨🇵 as the blue, white and red tricolour, exactly like 🇫🇷. Windows, which has no flag emoji, shows the two letters C P instead.

That answers "clipperton island flag vs french flag": the pictures are the same, the characters are not. 🇨🇵 and 🇫🇷 are different letter pairs, so search, sorting and databases treat them as different flags. 🇲🇫 St. Martin, the French part of the Caribbean island, is usually drawn with the tricolour too. Designs shared online as a "Clipperton Island flag" are unofficial; Mexico also raised its flag there during its occupation. To paste the flag, copy 🇨🇵 whole: it is one flag made of two hidden characters.

Clipperton Island emoji: 🏝️ an atoll, 🦀 crabs and 🐦 boobies

Clipperton Island, Île de Clipperton in French, is a small coral atoll 🏝️🪸 in the eastern Pacific, more than 1,000 km south-west of Acapulco, Mexico 🇲🇽. It is a narrow ring of coral sand around a lagoon that is cut off from the ocean, with a few groves of coconut palms 🌴🥥. Its one landmark is Clipperton Rock 🪨, a volcanic outcrop about 29 m high on the south-east rim, the last visible piece of the volcano 🌋 the reef grew on. 🌎📍 is the usual way to point at it on the map.

Its population is zero: nobody lives there, and there is no capital. The island belongs to the land crabs 🦀, orange crabs that swarm over it in huge numbers, and to the seabirds 🐦🪺, above all masked boobies, which nest there in one of the largest colonies of their kind. Pigs 🐖 left by earlier settlers ate eggs and crabs until they were shot out in 1958, after which the bird colonies grew back. Around the reef the sea is full of sharks 🦈 and reef fish 🐠, and the weather is hot and very wet 🌧️🌦️ for much of the year.

Why Clipperton Island is French

French sailors ⛵ sighted the atoll on Good Friday 1711 and named it Île de la Passion, after the Passion of Christ remembered that day; Spanish speakers still call it Isla de la Pasión. The English name comes from John Clipperton, an English pirate 🏴‍☠️ said to have used it as a hideout in the early 1700s. France formally claimed it in 1858, but Mexico 🇲🇽 also claimed it as its own, and in the early 1900s Mexico held it with a small garrison while guano was dug there.

The two countries asked King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy 🇮🇹 to settle the dispute, and in 1931 his award ⚖️ gave the island to France; lawyers still cite the Clipperton Island case on how a remote, empty territory can be owned. Clipperton was run from French Polynesia 🇵🇫 until 2007 and is now under the direct authority of France's minister for the overseas territories. Its value today is mostly the sea around it: owning the atoll gives France a large exclusive economic zone of tuna-rich Pacific waters, which French navy ships 🚢 patrol on regular visits.

The Clipperton Island tragedy and the lighthouse story 🕯️

The story most people search for is the Mexican one. In 1906 Mexico sent a garrison under Captain Ramón Arnaud to the island, and soldiers brought their wives and children; a supply ship 🚢⚓ came from Acapulco every few months. During the Mexican Revolution the ships stopped coming. The islanders lived on fish, birds and eggs 🐟🥚, but without fresh fruit and vegetables scurvy killed many of them, and in 1915 Arnaud and most of the remaining men drowned when their boat overturned as they rowed out toward a passing ship.

That left one man, the lighthouse keeper Victoriano Álvarez, with the women and children. He proclaimed himself king 👑 of Clipperton and terrorised them until, in July 1917, the women killed him. Almost at once the American gunboat USS Yorktown 🇺🇸 found the last survivors, a few women and their children, and took them back to Mexico. The Colombian writer Laura Restrepo told their story in the novel La isla de la pasión 📖 (1989). People who share it online use 🏝️💔, 👑 for the self-proclaimed king and 🕯️ for the dead.

Clipperton Island currency, letters and visits

Because the island is French, its official currency is the euro €; with no residents and no shops, that is true only on paper. In French names you need Î î, as in Île de Clipperton and Île de la Passion, and É é, as in the explorer Jean-Louis Étienne, who led a four-month scientific expedition there in 2004–2005; the Spanish name Isla de la Pasión needs ó. On Windows type them with Alt + 0206 Î, 0238 î, 0201 É, 0233 é, 0211 Ó and 0243 ó on the number pad, and € with Alt + 0128 (AltGr + E on most European keyboards). On a Mac, Option + I then i gives î, Option + E then e gives é, and Option + Shift + 2 gives €. In HTML use î, é, ó and €. Our French page has the whole alphabet.

Visitors include the French navy, scientists 🧑‍🔬🔬 who camp ⛺ for a few weeks to count birds and study the reef, the occasional dive boat 🤿, and amateur radio operators 📻📡, for whom Clipperton is one of the most wanted places in the world to contact; their "DXpeditions" land by small boat 🚤 through the surf, since there is no harbour.