Peru Emoji & Symbols

The Peru flag emoji 🇵🇪 shows the plain vertical red-white-red triband. The state flag adds the coat of arms in the white stripe, with a vicuña, a cinchona tree and a cornucopia spilling coins, but the emoji, like most flag emoji, draws the simple version. A popular legend says General José de San Martín chose the colours after seeing a flock of flamingos with red wings and white breasts on the coast; historians treat that as a story, not a record.

Behind the scenes 🇵🇪 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇵 and 🇪, the country code PE. Phones and Macs join them into a flag; Windows has no country flags in its emoji font and shows the two letters instead, which is why the Peru flag emoji can look like PE on a PC. When the flag will not show, Peruvians type the colours instead: ❤️🤍❤️ or 🔴⚪🔴 is a heart-and-dot version of the flag, common in comments during football matches and in late July.

Machu Picchu, Andes and Amazon emoji

There is no Machu Picchu emoji, so people build it: 🏔️ for the peaks, 🌄 for sunrise over the citadel, 🦙 for the llamas that graze its terraces, 🚞 for the train up the Urubamba valley to Aguas Calientes and 🥾🏕️ for the four-day Inca Trail. 🪨 stands for the famous fitted Inca stonework of Cusco, 🌈 for Vinicunca, the striped Rainbow Mountain, 🌋 for El Misti above Arequipa and 🛶 for the reed boats and floating islands of the Uros on Lake Titicaca, which Peru shares with Bolivia.

🦙 is the closest emoji to the vicuña on the coat of arms and to the alpacas whose wool becomes 🧶 Andean textiles. 🦅 stands in for the Andean condor, the great vulture of the Colca Canyon. 🌞 Sun with Face fits Inti, the Inca sun god, who is drawn in Peruvian art as a golden sun with a face.

The coast is desert: 🏜️ for the dunes of Huacachina and the Nazca plain, 🛩️ for the small planes that fly over the Nazca Lines (a hummingbird, a monkey and a spider are among the figures), 🐧🦭 for the Humboldt penguins and sea lions of the Ballestas Islands, 🌊🏄 for a surf coast with some of the longest left-hand waves in the world. East of the Andes the Amazon fills most of the map: 🌳🐒🦜🐆🦥, and 🐬 for the pink river dolphins near Iquitos.

Peruvian food emoji: ceviche, pollo a la brasa, pisco sour

Ceviche is the national dish and has its own emoji recipe: 🐟 raw fish cured in 🍋‍🟩 lime juice with 🧅 red onion and 🌶️ ají chili, served with 🍠 sweet potato (camote) and 🌽 big-kernelled Andean corn (choclo). Add 🦐 and 🐙 for seafood platters and pulpo al olivo, octopus in a purple olive sauce.

🥔 matters more in Peru than anywhere: the potato was domesticated in the southern Andes thousands of years ago, and Peruvian markets sell many native varieties in every colour. 🍗🍟 is pollo a la brasa, rotisserie chicken with fries; 🍚 the rice that comes with almost every lunch; 🫔 tamales and humitas; 🍲 the stews and soups of the highlands. 🥢🍜 means chifa, the Chinese-Peruvian cooking that gave the country lomo saltado and arroz chaufa. 🐹 is the nearest emoji to the cuy (guinea pig), a festive Andean dish.

Sweets: 🍩 picarones, ring-shaped fritters of squash and sweet potato in chancaca syrup; 🍮 suspiro a la limeña; 🍫 Peruvian cacao. Drinks: 🍸🍇 pisco sour, made with pisco grape brandy, lime, syrup and egg white; 🥤 Inca Kola, the golden-yellow soda; 🍺 a cold beer; ☕ highland coffee; 🍵 mate de coca, the coca-leaf tea served to travellers against altitude sickness.

Peru holidays, music and sport emoji

Fiestas Patrias on 28 and 29 July celebrate independence, proclaimed in Lima on 28 July 1821; houses hang the flag and chats fill with 🇵🇪🎆🎉 and ❤️🤍❤️. Inti Raymi, the Inca festival of the sun, is re-enacted in Cusco every 24 June (🌞). October is the purple month of the Señor de los Milagros, the huge Lima procession whose devotees wear purple habits: ⛪✝️💜🙏.

💃🕺 is the marinera, the national couple dance performed with handkerchiefs; 🥁 stands in for the cajón, the Afro-Peruvian box drum; 🪈 for the quena and the zampoña pan pipes; 🎸🎶 for música criolla and the small Andean charango.

⚽ is the national obsession; Peru won the Copa América in 1939 and 1975 (🏆), and its 2018 World Cup place ended a 36-year wait. 🏐 belongs to the women's volleyball team, silver medallists at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and 🏄 to surfers such as Sofía Mulánovich, world champion in 2004.

Peru sol symbol S/ and the letters of Peru

Peru's currency is the sol (PEN), and its symbol is S/, a capital S followed by a slash, written before the amount: S/ 25.00. There is no single Unicode character for it, so type the two characters or copy S/ from the combos below. Older prices show S/. from the days of the nuevo sol, which replaced the inti in 1991 and was renamed simply sol in 2015. The name means sun, a nod to Inti. US dollars ($ 💵) are widely quoted for rent, travel and big purchases, and street money changers (💱) swap soles for dollars.

Spanish is spoken by most Peruvians (about 24 million in CLDR's estimate), Quechua by nearly 5 million and Aymara by around half a million, mostly near Lake Titicaca; Spanish is official nationwide, while Quechua and Aymara are official in areas where each predominates. Spanish brings ñ, the acute accents á é í ó ú, ü (as in pingüino) and the opening ¿ and ¡. Quechua uses ñ too, as in Qhapaq Ñan, the Inca road network; Cusco-Collao Quechua marks ejective consonants with an apostrophe (p' t' ch' k' q'), properly ʼ; Aymara does the same and writes long vowels with a diaeresis: ä ï ü. See our Spanish, Quechua and Aymara collections for the full alphabets.

How to type ñ, accents and the Peru flag

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 ¡; Peruvian keyboards use the Latin American layout, which has its own Ñ key. On a Mac with the ABC keyboard layout, Option + N then N gives ñ, Option + E then a vowel gives the acute, Option + U then a vowel gives ä ï 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, open the emoji keyboard and search "Peru" (or "Perú"), press Win + . on Windows or Ctrl + Cmd + Space on a Mac, or just copy 🇵🇪 from this page.