Puerto Rico Emoji & Symbols

The Puerto Rico flag emoji 🇵🇷 is two regional indicator letters, 🇵 and 🇷, for the region code PR. Phones, Macs and most apps join the pair into the flag. Windows is the exception: its emoji font has no country flags, so on a Windows PC 🇵🇷 often appears as the letters PR, and becomes the flag again when the same text is opened on a phone. On an iPhone or Android keyboard, search "Puerto Rico" in the emoji search to find it.

The flag was designed in 1895 by Puerto Rican exiles in New York, members of the Puerto Rico section of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and it is the Cuban flag with the colours swapped: five red and white stripes and a blue triangle with a single white star, the estrella solitaria, which is why Puerto Ricans call it la monoestrellada. The bond with Cuba is old: the poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió wrote that Cuba and Puerto Rico are "the two wings of one bird" 🇵🇷🇨🇺. For years showing the flag in public was itself a political act; the 1948 Ley de la Mordaza, the Gag Law, made displaying it a crime until the law was repealed in 1957. It became the official flag of the Commonwealth with the 1952 constitution.

The blue is a debate of its own. The official flag has long flown with a dark blue like that of the US flag, while independence supporters and many others prefer the sky blue, azul celeste, which they hold to be the colour of 1895. There is no separate light-blue flag emoji: people who search for one write 🇵🇷🩵, using the light blue heart. For a Puerto Rican flag heart, send 🇵🇷❤️ or the three hearts ❤️🤍💙; 🟥⬜🟦⭐ spells the flag in squares for usernames.

The black-and-white flag goes back to 2016, when the collective Artistas Solidarixs y en Resistencia repainted it on a door in Old San Juan in protest against PROMESA and the federal fiscal oversight board it created. It has since spread on walls, T-shirts and profile pictures. There is no emoji for it; people write 🏴🇵🇷 or 🖤🤍🇵🇷. Next to the Dominican flag 🇩🇴 and the Cuban flag 🇨🇺 it is easy to pick the wrong one in an emoji search, so check that the triangle is blue and the stripes red.

Puerto Rico symbols and meanings: the coquí, the Taíno sun and the flor de maga

No emoji stands for Puerto Rico more than the frog 🐸, because it plays the coquí, a tiny tree frog whose males call "co-QUÍ" all night across the island. Puerto Ricans say soy de aquí como el coquí, "I'm from here like the coquí", and the frog shows up on souvenirs, tattoos and the sign-off of homesick messages. There is no coquí emoji of its own; 🐸 with 🇵🇷 is how everyone writes it.

Before the Spanish arrived the island was called Borikén by the Taíno, which gave the words Borinquen and boricua, the name Puerto Ricans use for themselves. Taíno petroglyphs are the source of popular Puerto Rico symbols for tattoos and art: the coquí carved in stone and the Taíno sun, the Sol de Jayuya, a round face with rays, for which 🌞 is the nearest emoji.

The national flower is the flor de maga, a red flower of the mallow family, close kin to the hibiscus 🌺; the national tree is the huge ceiba 🌳. The Puerto Rican parrot, the iguaca 🦜, lives only on the island and is one of the rarest birds in the world, while the little reina mora 🐦 is widely considered the national bird. The coat of arms, granted by the Spanish Crown in 1511, shows a white lamb 🐑 lying on a book, the lamb of Saint John the Baptist: the island was first named San Juan Bautista, and the capital was called Puerto Rico, "rich port", until the names swapped. The Paso Fino horse 🐎, with its smooth four-beat gait, is a Puerto Rican breed.

Puerto Rican food emoji: mofongo, arroz con gandules and lechón

🍌🧄🥓 is mofongo: green plantains fried, then mashed in a wooden pilón with garlic, olive oil and chicharrón, pork cracklings. Plantain also makes tostones, flattened and fried twice. The holiday plate is arroz con gandules, rice with pigeon peas and sofrito, 🍚🫛, next to lechón, whole pork roasted slowly on a spit 🐖; on an ordinary day it is rice and stewed beans, arroz con habichuelas 🍚🫘, often with avocado 🥑.

At Christmas families make pasteles, a dough of green banana and root vegetables filled with pork, wrapped in plantain leaves and boiled; 🫔 is the closest emoji. Roadside kiosks, from Piñones to Luquillo, sell frituras: empanadillas and pastelillos 🥟, alcapurrias filled with meat or land crab 🦀, bacalaítos made of salt cod and cornmeal sorullitos 🌽. 🍲 is asopao, a soupy rice stew, and 🥖 the crusty pan de agua eaten every morning.

For dessert there is flan and tembleque, a coconut pudding 🍮🥥, and on hot afternoons a piragua 🍧, shaved ice with fruit syrup from a street cart. The piña colada 🍹🍍🥥 is said to have been invented in San Juan in the 1950s and has been the official drink of Puerto Rico since 1978. 🥥🥛🥃 is coquito, the Christmas coconut eggnog with rum; 🥃 alone is Puerto Rican rum, 🍺 a cold Medalla, and ☕ the strong coffee grown in the mountains around Yauco and Utuado.

Old San Juan, El Yunque and the bioluminescent bays

🏰 is El Morro, the Castillo San Felipe del Morro, the Spanish fortress at the mouth of San Juan Bay, part of a UNESCO World Heritage site together with La Fortaleza and the city walls. 🏘️ is Old San Juan itself, its streets of painted houses and blue-grey cobblestones, and ⛪ the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista, where Juan Ponce de León is buried. In the east, El Yunque 🌳🌧️ is the only tropical rainforest in the US National Forest System, and the home of the coquí and the iguaca.

Three bays glow at night when a boat or a hand moves through the water, lit by tiny plankton: Mosquito Bay on Vieques, often called the brightest in the world, Laguna Grande in Fajardo and La Parguera in Lajas; 🌊✨🌙 is how people post a night kayak there. 🏖️🌴☀️ covers the beaches, from Flamenco Beach on the island of Culebra 🏝️, where sea turtles nest 🐢, to Rincón in the west, which hosted the World Surfing Championships in 1968 🏄 and where humpback whales 🐋 pass in winter. 🦎 is the green iguana, an introduced lizard now found all over the island.

📡 stands for the Arecibo Observatory, whose 305-metre dish was the world's largest single-dish radio telescope for over fifty years, until FAST surpassed it in 2016; Arecibo collapsed in December 2020. And 🌀 is the hurricane season: after Hurricane María struck on 20 September 2017, 🇵🇷🙏 and Puerto Rico se levanta, "Puerto Rico rises", filled timelines across the world.

Puerto Rico emoji for holidays, music and sports

Christmas in Puerto Rico is one of the longest anywhere 🎄. It runs from late November through Three Kings' Day on 6 January, when children leave grass in a shoebox under the bed for the Kings' camels, 👑🐪🌿🎁, and it closes with the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián in Old San Juan in mid-January 🎉. Along the way come parrandas, friends who turn up at a house at night singing with a cuatro 🎸, maracas 🪇 and a güiro. On the Noche de San Juan, 23 June, people walk into the sea at midnight and fall backwards into the waves for good luck 🌊🌙. 👹🎭 are the vejigantes, the horned masked figures of the Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza and the carnival in Ponce. 🇵🇷🗽 is the National Puerto Rican Day Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York, held each June: more Puerto Ricans now live on the US mainland than on the island, and the flights between them are fondly called la guagua aérea, the air bus ✈️.

🪘🥁 are bomba, the Afro-Puerto Rican drum and dance tradition strongest in Loíza, and plena, the sung news of Ponce played on hand drums. 🎺💃🕺 is salsa, built by Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians in New York and San Juan, and 🎤🔥 is reggaetón, from Daddy Yankee's "Gasolina" to Bad Bunny, who is from Vega Baja; "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, 2017, is one of the best-known Puerto Rican songs.

⚾ means Roberto Clemente, who reached 3,000 hits, died on 31 December 1972 in a plane carrying aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua and became the first Latin American player in the Hall of Fame. 🥊 is boxing, the sport of champions such as Félix "Tito" Trinidad and Miguel Cotto, and 🏀 recalls the 2004 Athens Olympics, where Puerto Rico beat the United States 92–73. Puerto Rico competes at the Olympics under its own flag, and its first gold medal 🥇 came from Mónica Puig in tennis 🎾 in Rio in 2016. 👑 stands for the island's five Miss Universe titles, and 🁡 for dominoes, slapped down at plaza tables all over the island.

How to type Spanish letters and the dollar sign

Puerto Rico has two official languages, Spanish and English. Of roughly 3 million people, CLDR estimates about 2.6 million speak Spanish and about 1.5 million English, and everyday life runs in Spanish, so its letters Ñ ñ Á á É é Í í Ó ó Ú ú Ü ü and the opening marks ¿ ¡ come up in every message: ¡Wepa!, ¿Qué es la que hay?, Borinquen, coquí, Mayagüez. The full alphabet, accents and keyboard tricks are in the Spanish Accent Marks & Letters collection, and the English side in the English collection.

On Windows hold Alt and type 0241 for ñ, 0209 for Ñ, 0225 for á, 0233 for é, 0237 for í, 0243 for ó, 0250 for ú, 0252 for ü, 0191 for ¿ and 0161 for ¡. On a Mac press Option+N then N for ñ, Option+E then the vowel for an acute accent, Option+U then U for ü, Option+1 for ¡ and Option+Shift+? for ¿. On a phone, hold down a letter to see its accented forms.

Puerto Rico uses the US dollar $ 💵, so prices are written $5.00 like anywhere in the States. In speech many people still call a dollar a peso, a quarter a peseta and cents chavos, written with the cent sign ¢: no tengo ni un chavo means "I'm broke".