Ecuador Emoji & Symbols

The Ecuador flag emoji 🇪🇨 shows a horizontal tricolour: a yellow band as tall as the blue and red bands together, with the national coat of arms in the middle. The arms carry an Andean condor with spread wings above a shield showing snow-capped Chimborazo, the Guayas river with a steamship on it, and a sun framed by the zodiac signs of the months of the March Revolution of 1845. Ecuador marks Flag Day on 26 September.

Why do Colombia and Ecuador have the same flag? Both, like Venezuela, inherited the yellow, blue and red of Gran Colombia, the republic that united them after independence from Spain. Colombia's 🇨🇴 has the same three bands but no emblem; Venezuela's 🇻🇪 has equal bands and an arc of white stars. Most emoji fonts draw Ecuador's coat of arms, so the condor in the middle is the quickest way to tell 🇪🇨 from 🇨🇴 at a glance.

Behind the scenes 🇪🇨 is two regional indicator letters, 🇪 and 🇨, the country code EC. Phones and Macs join them into a flag; Windows has no country flags in its emoji font and shows the letters EC instead. Where the flag will not show, Ecuadorians type the colours: 💛💙❤️ or 🟡🔵🔴 fill comments under every goal of La Tri, the national team.

Ecuador symbols and meanings: the condor, Chimborazo and the equator

🦅 stands in for the Andean condor, the national bird and the crest of the coat of arms; Ecuadorians use it for pride, the Andes and the national team. 🏔️ is Chimborazo, the highest mountain in Ecuador at over 6,200 m. Because the Earth bulges at the equator, its summit is the point on the planet's surface farthest from the Earth's centre, farther even than the top of Everest. 🌋 is Cotopaxi, the snow-capped cone south of Quito and one of the highest active volcanoes in the world; Tungurahua above the spa town of Baños (♨️) and Pichincha above Quito are volcanoes too.

The country is named after the equator, Spanish ecuador, which crosses it just north of Quito. 🌎🧭 and 0° are how people caption a visit to the Mitad del Mundo, the monument on the line, where tourists stand with one foot in each hemisphere. Quito itself, at about 2,850 m, is one of the highest capital cities in the world; its colonial centre, full of churches (⛪) such as the gilded La Compañía, was among the first places put on UNESCO's World Heritage List, in 1978.

👒 is the closest emoji to the toquilla straw hat, the hat the world calls a Panama. It is woven in Ecuador, around Montecristi and Cuenca; the name stuck because the hats were shipped through Panama and worn by the canal builders. UNESCO lists the traditional weaving of the Ecuadorian toquilla straw hat as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Galápagos emoji, the Amazon and the coast

There is no Galápagos emoji, so people build one: 🐢 for the giant tortoises the islands are named after (galápago is an old Spanish word for tortoise), 🦎 for the marine iguana, the only lizard that feeds in the sea, 🐧 for the Galápagos penguin, the only penguin that lives north of the equator, 🦭 for the sea lions sleeping on every bench of the harbour, 🦈 for the hammerhead schools divers come for (🤿) and 🐦 for the blue-footed booby, often with 💙 for its feet. 🦀 is the red Sally Lightfoot crab, 🦩 the flamingos of the lagoons. The islands lie about 1,000 km off the coast; Charles Darwin visited them in 1835 on HMS Beagle.

East of the Andes, Ecuador's Amazon (el Oriente) is rainforest: 🌳🐒🦜🐸🐍🦋, 🐆 for the jaguar, 🦥 for sloths and 🛶 for the dugout canoes on the Napo river and in Yasuní National Park. In the highlands 🦙 stands for llamas and the vicuñas that graze the slopes of Chimborazo, 🚡 for Quito's TelefériQo cable car up Pichincha and 🥾 for the trek around Quilotoa's crater lake.

The Pacific coast is 🏄🌴🏖️: surf at Montañita, beaches around Salinas and 🐋 for the humpback whales that come to breed off Puerto López in the southern winter. Ecuador's export mix spans the coast and highlands: it is the world's largest exporter of 🍌 bananas, and one of the biggest exporters of 🦐 farmed shrimp, 🌹 highland roses and fine-flavour cacao for 🍫 chocolate, with ☕ coffee from Loja and the highlands.

Ecuadorian food emoji: encebollado, ceviche with popcorn and llapingachos

Encebollado is the coastal breakfast and the famous cure for chuchaqui, the Ecuadorian word for a hangover: a soup of 🐟 albacore tuna and yuca topped with pickled 🧅 red onion and 🍋‍🟩 lime, eaten with plantain chips (chifles, so 🍌 again). Ecuadorian ceviche is soupier than its neighbours': 🦐 shrimp in lime and 🍅 tomato juice, served with 🍿 canguil, popcorn, scattered on top.

The highlands eat 🥔 potato: llapingachos are potato and 🧀 cheese patties served with a 🍳 fried egg, 🥑 avocado and a 🥜 peanut sauce, and locro de papa is a potato soup with cheese and avocado (🍲). 🐖 is hornado, a whole roast pig sold in markets, 🐹 the nearest emoji to cuy, roast guinea pig for festive days, 🌽 the big-kernelled choclo and mote, 🫔 humitas and tamales steamed in leaves, 🥟 empanadas, among them the puffy fried empanadas de viento dusted with sugar. 🍚🫘 is arroz con menestra, rice with stewed beans or lentils, the lunch plate of the coast.

Sweets and drinks: 🫐🍞 is the pair for 2 November, colada morada, a thick purple drink of black corn flour and Andean blueberries, with guaguas de pan, bread babies (guagua is the Kichwa word for child). 🍨 is helado de paila, ice cream stirred in a copper pan on ice, a speciality of Ibarra; 🥥 coconut water and cocadas on the coast; 🍺 a cold beer at the match.

Ecuador holidays, music and sport emoji

Independence is celebrated twice: 10 de Agosto remembers the Primer Grito de Independencia in Quito in 1809, and 24 de Mayo the Battle of Pichincha in 1822 that freed the city; Guayaquil celebrates its own independence on 9 October 1820. 🇪🇨🎆 goes with all three. Carnaval means water fights, so 🎈💦🎉, with Guaranda's carnival the most famous. On 6 December the Fiestas de Quito mark the founding of the city with music and chivas, open-sided party buses (🚌), and the cry ¡Viva Quito!

New Year's Eve is Año Viejo: families build a life-size effigy stuffed with paper and sawdust, the año viejo (old year), dress it and burn it in the street at midnight (🔥🎆), and some men dress up as its viudas, the old year's 'widows', to beg coins from passing cars. In June the Kichwa communities of Imbabura around Otavalo and Cotacachi dance through Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun (🌞), and Otavalo's Saturday market sells the textiles (🧶) the town is known for. 🎭 is for the masked dancers of the Mama Negra in Latacunga and the Diablada of Píllaro.

Music: 🎸 for pasillo, the slow, sad guitar song of Quito and Cuenca; 🪈 for the rondador and the pan pipes of the Andes; 🪘🥁 for the marimba music of Afro-Ecuadorians in Esmeraldas, played with cununo and bombo drums; 💃🕺🎶 for a dance floor of sanjuanito and salsa.

Sport: ⚽ is first. La Tri reached the World Cup in 2002, 2006, 2014 and 2022, when it beat hosts Qatar 2–0 in the opening match, and qualified again for 2026; 🏆 belongs to clubs like LDU Quito, Copa Libertadores champions in 2008. 🏐 is ecuavoley, three-a-side street volleyball played over a high net in every neighbourhood. Ecuador's Olympic golds include 🚶 Jefferson Pérez in the 20 km walk in 1996 (the country's first Olympic medal), 🚴 Richard Carapaz in the Tokyo 2020 road race and 🏋️ Neisi Dajomes in Tokyo 2020 weightlifting, and 🚶 Brian Pintado in the Paris 2024 20 km walk (🥇); Carapaz had also won the 2019 Giro d'Italia.

Ecuador currency symbol $ and how to type Ecuadorian letters

Ecuador's currency is the US dollar, so its currency symbol is plain $ (💵), written before the amount: $5. The country gave up its own currency, the sucre, in 2000 during a deep banking crisis, at 25,000 sucres to the dollar. Ecuador still mints its own centavo coins (🪙), the same size and value as US cents, nickels, dimes and quarters, and they circulate side by side with US coins and banknotes. There is no separate Ecuadorian dollar sign; in code the currency is USD.

Spanish is the language of almost everyone: CLDR estimates about 18 million Spanish speakers in a population of some 18 million, and the 2008 constitution makes Kichwa and Shuar official languages of intercultural relations alongside it. CLDR lists about 3 million speakers for Quechua (Kichwa) in Ecuador and separately lists about 1 million for Chimborazo Highland Quichua, which is within the Quechua macrolanguage; census counts of people who speak it at home are far lower. Spanish needs ñ, the acute accents á é í ó ú, ü (as in pingüino) and the opening ¿ and ¡. Kichwa's unified spelling writes three vowels, a i u, and needs only ñ beyond A–Z, with digraphs such as ch, sh and ll; it writes k and w where older spellings had c, qu and hu, which is how Quichua became Kichwa. Kichwa words run all through Ecuadorian Spanish: ñaño and ñaña for brother and sister, guagua for a child, ¡achachay! when it is cold and ¡arrarray! when something burns. See our Spanish, Quechua and Chimborazo Highland Quichua collections for the full alphabets, and Colombia and Peru for the neighbours.

On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0241 for ñ, 0209 for Ñ, 0225 á, 0233 é, 0237 í, 0243 ó, 0250 ú, 0252 ü, 0191 ¿ and 0161 ¡; Ecuadorian keyboards use the Latin American layout, which has its own Ñ key. On a Mac, Option + N then N gives ñ, Option + E then a vowel gives the acute, Option + U then U gives ü, Option + 1 gives ¡ and Option + Shift + ? gives ¿. On a phone, long-press N for ñ and a vowel for its accents. For the flag, search "Ecuador" in the emoji keyboard, press Win + . on Windows or Ctrl + Cmd + Space on a Mac, or copy 🇪🇨 from this page.