Panama Emoji & Symbols

The Panama flag emoji 🇵🇦 is made of two regional indicator letters, 🇵 and 🇦, for the country code PA; phones, Macs and most apps join the pair into a flag. Windows is the usual exception: its emoji font has no country flags, so on a Windows PC 🇵🇦 may appear as the letters PA. The text is unchanged, and the flag shows as soon as it is opened on a phone.

The flag is divided into four quarters: white with a blue star at the top next to the flagpole, plain red at the top on the fly side, plain blue at the bottom next to the pole and white with a red star at the bottom. It was designed by Manuel Encarnación Amador and sewn by María de la Ossa de Amador, and it was first raised when Panama separated from Colombia in November 1903. The usual reading is that blue and red stand for the two political parties of the time, the Conservatives and the Liberals, and white for the peace between them; the blue star stands for purity and honesty, the red star for authority and law.

There is no single Panama heart, so a "Panama flag heart" is written 🇵🇦❤️ or with the three colours ❤️🤍💙. In squares the flag is ⬜🟥 over 🟦⬜, and ⭐ or ★ adds the stars where flags do not display, for example in usernames and some games.

Panama symbols and meanings: the canal, the harpy eagle and the golden frog

For most of the world Panama means the canal: 🚢. About 80 kilometres long, it opened in 1914 after the French attempt of the 1880s had failed and the United States had taken over the work. Locks lift ships about 26 metres up to Gatun Lake and lower them again on the other side, and since 2016 a third, wider set of locks has carried the giant container ships and liquefied-gas carriers known as Neopanamax. Panama took full control of the canal on 31 December 1999. 🚢🌊🌎 is the canal joining two oceans, 🛳️ the cruise ships that make the crossing and ⚓ the ports of Balboa and Colón at its two ends.

The harpy eagle, one of the largest and most powerful eagles in the world, is Panama's national bird, so 🦅 stands for it. The Panamanian golden frog, a bright yellow-and-black toad that was long seen as a sign of good luck and is now nearly gone from the wild, has a national day of its own on 14 August: 🐸💛. The national flower is the Holy Ghost orchid, flor del Espíritu Santo, a white orchid whose centre looks like a small dove; there is no orchid emoji, so people use 🕊️🤍. The name itself is often said to have meant "abundance of fish, trees and butterflies" in a local language, though its origin is not certain.

Panama City is the skyline of towers along the bay 🏙️ and the Bridge of the Americas over the Pacific entrance of the canal 🌉. The first railway across the Americas opened here in 1855 🚂, Panama City's Metro, opened in 2014, was the first in Central America 🚇, and the brightly painted old school buses called diablos rojos, "red devils", are a symbol of the city's streets 🚌.

Panama emoji for islands, rainforest and wildlife

Panama has the Caribbean on one side and the Pacific on the other, and its emoji follow both coasts. 🏝️⛵ is Guna Yala, the San Blas islands, where the Guna people govern their own territory of small palm-covered islands 🌴; 🏖️ is Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean and the Pearl Islands in the Pacific. The humpback whales 🐋 that come to the Pearl Islands and the Gulf of Chiriquí between about July and October, dolphins 🐬, nesting sea turtles 🐢 and the sharks, reef fish and corals 🦈🐠🪸 of Coiba National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, cover the sea.

Inland it is rainforest: sloths 🦥, howler and capuchin monkeys 🐒, jaguars in the Darién 🐆, coatis 🦝 (there is no coati emoji; the raccoon is its cousin), crocodiles 🐊 and iguanas 🦎 along the canal, and the blue morpho butterfly 🦋. There is no toucan emoji, so 🦜 stands for toucans and macaws alike. In the western highlands stands Volcán Barú 🌋, the highest point in the country, from whose top both oceans can be seen on a clear morning; around it are the cool cloud forests and coffee farms of Boquete 🌫️☕ and the national parks 🏞️. Panama is tropical, so ☀️ is the dry season, roughly December to April, and 🌧️🌈 the long rainy season.

On the Caribbean coast, the fortresses of Portobelo and San Lorenzo 🏰, built to guard Spain's silver route, are a World Heritage site, and 🏴‍☠️ recalls the pirate Henry Morgan, who sacked old Panama City in 1671; its ruins, Panamá Viejo, stand near today's skyline. For things to do there is surfing 🏄, diving 🤿, sport fishing 🎣, hiking 🥾 and paddling 🛶: every year teams race traditional cayuco canoes through the canal from ocean to ocean.

Panamanian food emoji: sancocho, patacones and raspao

The national dish is sancocho, a chicken soup with the root vegetable ñame and lots of culantro, a strong-tasting relative of coriander: 🍲🍗🌿. It is served with white rice 🍚, which Panamanians eat with almost every meal, and the Christmas table has arroz con guandú, rice with pigeon peas 🍚🫘, and tamales wrapped in leaves 🫔.

Patacones are slices of green plantain fried twice 🍌; hojaldras are fried dough eaten at breakfast 🫓; corn 🌽 becomes tortillas and bollos; and 🥟 stands for empanadas and carimañolas, fried yuca rolls filled with meat. The sea gives ceviche of white fish with lime 🐟🍋‍🟩, shrimp 🦐 and lobster 🦞, and on the Caribbean coast coconut 🥥 goes into the rice and into rondón, a fish stew.

Fruit is everywhere 🍍🥭, and on hot days street sellers scrape a raspao, shaved ice with syrup and condensed milk 🍧. Chicha means fresh fruit juice 🥤, seco is the sugar-cane spirit of the countryside 🥃, and cold beer 🍺 is part of every carnival. The coffee ☕ of Boquete includes the Geisha variety, which has set record prices at coffee auctions.

Pollera, molas, carnival and November: Panama emoji for every occasion

The pollera, Panama's national dress, is a white, finely embroidered dress worn with gold jewellery and trembling hair ornaments called tembleques: 💃👗. Men wear the white montuno shirt and the black-and-white woven sombrero pintao, whose weaving UNESCO lists as intangible heritage; 👒 is the nearest emoji. The famous "Panama hat" is a different hat: it is woven in Ecuador and got its name because it was sold to the world through Panama, not least to the canal workers. Guna women wear molas, panels of layered, cut and hand-stitched cloth on their blouses 🧵🪡.

The countryside's música típica is led by the accordion with a drum 🪗🥁; the mejorana is played on a small Panamanian guitar 🎸; and the national dance, the tamborito, is danced to drums and handclaps 🪘👏. Panama also gave the world the salsa singer Rubén Blades and is one of the places where Spanish-language reggae began 🎤🎶. The costumed devils of Corpus Christi and the Congo traditions of the Caribbean coast, which UNESCO also lists, are 🎭👹.

November is the month of the homeland, el mes de la patria: 3 November is Separation from Colombia, 4 November Flag Day, 5 November Colón Day, 10 November the first cry of independence in La Villa de Los Santos and 28 November independence from Spain in 1821. Schools march with drum and bugle bands 🇵🇦🥁🎺, and the nights end with 🎆. Carnival, the four days before Ash Wednesday, is 🎉🎊 with queens, parades and culecos, when water trucks and hoses soak the crowd 💦; Las Tablas has the most famous one.

Panama is mostly Catholic ⛪✝️🙏. Every 21 October pilgrims, many dressed in purple, walk to Portobelo for the Black Christ, the Cristo Negro 💜🚶. Christmas 🎄 and New Year bring tamales and fireworks, and Mother's Day falls on 8 December.

Panama sports emoji, the balboa and how to type Spanish letters

Baseball ⚾ is a passion in Panama: Mariano Rivera, the great New York Yankees closer, was born there and became the first player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame unanimously. Boxing 🥊 gave the country many world champions, above all Roberto Durán, Manos de Piedra, "Hands of Stone". Football ⚽ had its big day in 2018, when Panama played its first World Cup, and the country's first Olympic gold 🥇 came from Irving Saladino in the long jump in Beijing in 2008.

Panama's currency is the balboa, code PAB, named after the explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa; it is fixed one to one with the US dollar and has no banknotes of its own. Panama mints balboa coins 🪙 and uses US dollar notes 💵, so prices are written with $ or with the balboa symbol B/., as in B/.10.00; it is written with three ordinary characters. Cents, centésimos, are written with ¢.

Spanish is the official language, spoken by about 3 million of Panama's roughly 4.5 million people in CLDR's estimates; English, spoken by an estimated 600,000, is at home on the Caribbean coast and the islands, and Panama also has one of the oldest Chinese communities in Latin America. To write Panamá correctly you need the Spanish letters á é í ó ú ü ñ and the opening marks ¿ ¡. On Windows hold Alt and type 0225 for á, 0233 é, 0237 í, 0243 ó, 0250 ú, 0252 ü, 0241 ñ, 0209 Ñ, 0191 ¿ and 0161 ¡; 0162 gives ¢. On a Mac press Option+E and then the vowel for an accent, Option+N then N for ñ, Option+U then U for ü, Option+1 for ¡, Option+Shift+? for ¿ and Option+4 for ¢. On a phone, hold a letter down to see its accented forms. The Spanish collection has all of them, and the English and Traditional Chinese collections cover Panama's other languages.