Colombia Emoji & Symbols

The Colombia flag emoji 🇨🇴 is not a single character. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇨 and 🇴, for the country code CO; phones and apps that know the pair draw the flag. Windows is the well-known exception: its emoji font has no country flags, so on a Windows PC 🇨🇴 often shows as the two letters CO. The flag is still there, and it appears as soon as the text is opened on a phone or a Mac.

The flag itself, adopted in 1861, is yellow over blue over red, with the yellow band as tall as the other two together. The usual reading is gold and the riches of the land for yellow, the two seas for blue and the blood shed for independence for red. For a flag in hearts or squares, paste 💛💙❤️ or 🟨🟦🟥: there is no single heart emoji in Colombia's colours, so a "Colombian flag heart" is either that heart row or 🇨🇴❤️.

At emoji size the flag of Ecuador 🇪🇨 looks almost the same, because both, like Venezuela 🇻🇪, come from the flag of Gran Colombia, the republic that united territories of present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela during the wars of independence. Ecuador's has the coat of arms in the middle and Venezuela's has equal stripes with an arc of stars; Colombia's is the plain one with the wide yellow band.

Colombia symbols and meanings: coffee, emeralds, butterflies and the condor

☕ is the first emoji most people send for Colombia. Its mountain coffee is famous worldwide, the Coffee Cultural Landscape of the Eje Cafetero is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and a tinto, a small cup of black coffee, is offered all day long. The grower and his mule from the Juan Valdez logo are 🧑‍🌾🫏.

💎 stands for Colombian emeralds, mined in Boyacá at places such as Muzo and prized for their deep green. 🦋 is the yellow butterfly of Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude sends clouds of yellow butterflies after one of its characters; the butterflies came back in Disney's Encanto, set in a Colombian mountain town, together with the family's magic candle 🕯️.

The official national symbols are the flag, the coat of arms and the national anthem. The Andean condor, which stands on top of the coat of arms, is the national bird; there is no condor emoji, so people use 🦅. The national tree is the Quindío wax palm, the tallest palm in the world, which towers over the Cocora Valley: 🌴. The national flower is an orchid, Cattleya trianae, which has no emoji of its own.

The sombrero vueltiao, the woven black-and-white hat of the Caribbean region, is an official cultural symbol of the nation, but it has no emoji either. The closest is 🤠, which also fits the llaneros, the cowboys of the eastern plains, with their horses 🐎.

Nature is the other big theme. Colombia has more bird species than any other country, so 🦜 (the macaws, guacamayas) and 🐦 are everywhere in Colombian posts, along with 🐸 for the tiny poison dart frogs of the Pacific rainforest, 🐆 for the jaguar of the Amazon, 🦥 and 🐒. On the water, 🐬 is the pink river dolphin of the Amazon, 🐋 the humpback whales that visit the Pacific coast from about July to October, and 🐢 the sea turtles of both coasts. The land runs from the snow peaks of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta 🏔️ and the volcanoes of the Andes 🌋 to Caribbean beaches and the islands of San Andrés 🏖️🏝️; 🌈 is Caño Cristales, the river nicknamed the river of five colours. Medellín's Metrocable gondolas over the hillside neighbourhoods are 🚡, the cable car up Monserrate in Bogotá is 🚠, and 🚌 stands in for the chiva, the brightly painted wooden country bus.

Colombian food emoji: arepas, bandeja paisa and ajiaco

The arepa, the round corn cake eaten at any meal, has no emoji, but 🫓 flatbread was made for it: Unicode lists arepa among that emoji's examples. Pair it with 🧀 for arepa con queso or 🍳 for the Caribbean arepa de huevo. 🥟 is the usual stand-in for empanadas, 🫔 for tamales wrapped in plantain leaves, and 🌽 for the corn behind most of them.

The bandeja paisa of Antioquia fits on one line of emoji: beans, rice, ground meat, chicharrón, a fried egg, ripe plantain and avocado, 🫘🍚🥩🥓🍳🍌🥑, with an arepa on the side. 🍲 is the soup pot of ajiaco, Bogotá's chicken soup with several kinds of potato 🥔, and of sancocho, the Sunday soup of the whole country.

On the Caribbean coast it is fried fish with coconut rice and patacones, fried green plantain: 🐟🥥🍌. Fruit is everywhere, and fresh juices 🥤 of lulo, mango or passion fruit come with almost every lunch; street vendors sell green mango with lime and salt, 🥭🍋‍🟩. To drink, 🍺 beer, and 🥃 for aguardiente, the anise spirit poured at parties.

Colombia emoji for holidays and festivals

The Barranquilla Carnival, in the days before Ash Wednesday, is a UNESCO-listed masterpiece of intangible heritage: 🎭💃🥁🎉. In August Medellín holds the Feria de las Flores, where silleteros carry huge flower arrangements on their backs, 💐🌼🌹; Colombia is also one of the world's largest exporters of cut flowers.

Christmas begins on the night of 7 December, the Día de las Velitas, when families set candles and paper lanterns along pavements and windowsills: 🕯️🕯️🕯️. The novena prayers follow from 16 to 24 December, 🎄⛪. At New Year many Colombians eat twelve grapes at midnight 🍇 and walk around the block with an empty suitcase 🧳 to wish for a year of travel, under fireworks 🎆.

The national days are 20 July, Independence Day, remembering the declaration of 1810, and 7 August, the Battle of Boyacá of 1819. A plain 🇨🇴🎉 or ¡Viva Colombia! 🇨🇴 does the job on both.

Music and sport: vallenato, salsa, football and cycling

🪗 is vallenato, the accordion music of the Caribbean north. 🥁🪈🪇 is cumbia, played with drums, the long gaita flute and maracas. 💃🕺 is salsa, above all in Cali, which calls itself the world capital of salsa, and 🎤🎶 covers the reggaeton and pop of Shakira, J Balvin, Karol G and Maluma. 🎸 can stand for the tiple, the small twelve-string guitar of the Andes.

⚽ means the national team, la Selección, in its yellow shirt, so 🇨🇴⚽💛 is the match-day message. 🚴 is cycling, a national passion: Egan Bernal became the first Latin American to win the Tour de France in 2019, and on Sundays Bogotá closes long stretches of road to cars for the Ciclovía. 🏋️ recalls María Isabel Urrutia, whose weightlifting gold in 2000 was Colombia's first Olympic gold medal.

🎯💥 is tejo, the national sport: players throw a heavy metal disc at a clay-filled board and score when it hits a small paper packet of gunpowder, which goes off with a bang.

How to type Spanish letters and the Colombian peso sign

Colombia's official language is Spanish, spoken by about 46 million of its roughly 50 million people (CLDR estimates), and the 1991 Constitution also makes the languages of its Indigenous and other ethnic peoples official in their own territories. Spanish needs á é í ó ú for stress (papá, dad, against papa, potato), ü in words like pingüino, ñ as in año and señor, and the opening ¿ and ¡. Place names keep them too: Bogotá, Medellín, Popayán, Boyacá. The Spanish Letters & Accents collection covers the whole alphabet.

On Windows hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0225 á, 0233 é, 0237 í, 0243 ó, 0250 ú, 0241 ñ, 0209 Ñ, 0191 ¿, 0161 ¡. On a Mac press Option+E and then the vowel for an acute accent, Option+N then N for ñ, Option+1 for ¡ and Option+Shift+? for ¿. On a phone, press and hold a letter or the ? and ! keys.

The Colombian peso uses the ordinary dollar sign $, written before the amount, with a full stop between thousands: $ 50.000 is fifty thousand pesos. Where it could be confused with US dollars, prices are written COP or COL$. The ₱ sign belongs to the Philippine peso and is not used in Colombia.