Réunion Island Emoji

🇷🇪 is made of two regional indicator letters, 🇷 and 🇪, Réunion's code RE. Your phone decides what to draw for the pair. Réunion is an overseas department and region of France, so its only official flag is the French tricolour 🇫🇷; emoji vendors may use one of two unofficial local flag designs for 🇷🇪. On Windows, the flag may appear as RE depending on the app and font; the person you send it to may also see letters.

The flag many Réunionnais fly as their own is a different, unofficial one: Lo Mahavéli, the radiant volcano, a red triangle sending out five yellow rays on a blue background, designed in the mid-1970s by Guy Pignolet. It has no emoji of its own, so Réunionnais add something that can only mean the island: 🇷🇪🌋, or the department number 974, which starts every postcode on the island and is used as a name for the island itself. 🇪🇺 belongs here too: Réunion is one of the EU's outermost regions, so it is in the European Union and pays in euros, far out in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar.

Réunion Island emoji and what they mean

🌋 is the Piton de la Fournaise, at 2,632 m one of the most active volcanoes in the world. It erupts most years, and when lava runs down the Grand Brûlé towards the sea, people drive out at night to watch. The older, extinct Piton des Neiges 🏔️, at about 3,070 m, is the highest point in the Indian Ocean; hikers sleep in a refuge below the summit and climb in the dark to watch the sunrise 🌄 over the sea of clouds.

⛰️🏞️ are the cirques: Cilaos, Salazie and Mafate, three huge amphitheatres left by the collapse of the old volcano, ringed by cliffs and full of waterfalls and green 🌿. Mafate has no road at all; its villages are reached on foot 🥾 or by helicopter 🚁, which also brings in supplies. Since 2010 the island's “pitons, cirques and remparts” have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and much of the interior is a national park.

Down on the coast, 🏖️🌊🌇 is the west: the beaches and coral lagoon 🪸🐠 of Saint-Gilles and L'Hermitage and their sunsets. From about July to October humpback whales 🐋 come up from the Antarctic to give birth off that coast, and dolphins 🐬 and green turtles 🐢 live there all year. 🦈 is a real subject here: after a run of shark attacks from 2011, swimming and surfing 🏄 outside the lagoons and supervised zones were banned. Above Saint-Leu, paragliders 🪂 take off over the lagoon almost every day.

Cari, rougail and Dodo: food emoji

🍛🍚 is cari, the everyday dish of Réunion: meat or fish slow-cooked with onion, garlic, tomato, turmeric and thyme, served with rice, grains (beans or lentils 🫘, the most prized from Cilaos) and a spoon of hot rougail 🌶️. Cari poulet, cari zourite (octopus 🐙) and rougail saucisse, sausages cooked in tomato 🍅 and chilli, are the classics, often made in a big pot over a wood fire for the Sunday pique-nique under the trees, a family institution.

🥟 stands for bouchons, little steamed dumplings from the island's Chinese families, and for samoussas, which came with its Indian ones; with bonbons piment, chilli fritters, they are what people buy at the roadside snack stand. Fruit 🍍🥭🍌🥥 is everywhere; the small Victoria pineapple is the local pride, and lychees fill the markets at Christmas.

🥃 is rum, and above all rhum arrangé, rum left for months in a big jar with vanilla, fruit or spices. Réunion was first called Île Bourbon, renamed during the Revolution, called Île Bonaparte under the Empire and returned to Île Bourbon before taking the name Réunion in 1848; Bourbon vanilla takes its name from the island's former name; the hand-pollination that made vanilla a crop was worked out here in 1841 by Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy. 🍺🦤 is the Dodo, the island's beer, with the extinct Mascarene bird on its label, and ☕ is Bourbon pointu, an old Réunion coffee variety.

Maloya, faiths and festivals

🪘🪇 is maloya, the music born among the enslaved and indentured workers on the sugar estates: call-and-response singing over the big roulèr drum, the kayamb, a flat rattle of sugarcane stems filled with seeds, and the bob, a musical bow. Kept off the official stage in the 1960s and 70s for its ties to the autonomy movement, it came back with singers such as Firmin Viry, Granmoun Lélé and Danyèl Waro, and in 2009 it was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage of humanity. A kabar is a maloya gathering 🎶💃🕺; séga is the lighter, dancing cousin.

Réunion's people descend from French settlers, enslaved people from Madagascar and East Africa, indentured workers from India, and Chinese and Gujarati merchants, and the island's calendar shows it. Catholic churches ⛪ stand beside Tamil temples 🛕, mosques 🕌 and Chinese temples; the Noor-e-Islam mosque in Saint-Denis dates to 1905, but Tsingoni's 16th-century mosque in Mayotte is France's oldest. Tamil families walk on fire 🔥 at temple festivals and hold the Cavadee procession; Dipavali 🪔 fills Saint-André with lamps; Chinese New Year 🏮🧨 brings lion dances and firecrackers to Saint-Denis.

⛓️‍💥✊ is for 20 December, Fèt Kaf, the public holiday that marks the day in 1848 when the abolition of slavery was proclaimed on the island. Christmas 🎄 falls in the southern summer, at lychee time and on the beach, and New Year 🎆 is loud with fireworks.

Sport, French and Creole letters and the euro sign

Every October the Grand Raid 🏃⛰️, nicknamed la Diagonale des Fous, the madmen's diagonal, sends thousands of trail runners more than 160 km across the island and through the cirques, with close to 10,000 m of climbing. Canyoning and climbing 🧗 in the ravines are big too, and football ⚽ is the most played sport: Dimitri Payet, born in Saint-Pierre, played for France at Euro 2016. The island also competes against its neighbours Mauritius 🇲🇺, Madagascar 🇲🇬, Seychelles 🇸🇨, Comoros 🇰🇲 and Mayotte 🇾🇹 in the Indian Ocean Island Games.

French is the official language, spoken by about 700,000 people on the island (a CLDR estimate), and it needs à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô œ ù û ü, plus the rare æ and ÿ; the name Réunion itself starts with one. Most people also speak Réunion Creole, around 560,000 of them by the same estimate, written much closer to the sound: Mi aime aou (I love you), Koman i lé ? (How are you?), lé bon (it's good). Its spelling uses é and è; every letter it writes can be copied from this page. Tamil, the heritage language of many families of Indian descent, lives on in temple songs and prayers. See our French, Réunion Creole and Tamil collections.

On a French AZERTY keyboard é, è, à, ç and ù have their own keys. On Windows hold Alt and type 0233 for é, 0201 for É, 0232 for è and 0231 for ç on the numeric keypad; on a Mac press Option+E then e for é, Option+E then Shift+E for É and Option+C for ç; on a phone, long-press the plain letter. The guillemets « » are the quotation marks, with a space inside. Réunion pays in euros €, written after the number as in France: 12,50 €; on Windows it is Alt+0128 on the numeric keypad or AltGr+E. See our France, Mauritius and Mayotte collections for the neighbours.