St Helena Emoji & Symbols

The St Helena flag emoji 🇸🇭 is not one picture in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, S and H, which phones and apps draw together as the flag; it arrived with the other country flags in 2015. SH is the ISO code of the whole British Overseas Territory of St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, but the flag you see is St Helena's own, and the other two islands have their own flag emoji, 🇦🇨 and 🇹🇦. On a system without flag support (Windows' own emoji font, for example) you see the letters SH instead; the text is the same, so your reader's phone still shows the flag.

The flag is the British Blue Ensign, dark blue with the Union Flag in the corner, carrying the island's shield on the right, in its present form since 1984. The top of the shield is gold with the wirebird, the St Helena plover; below it a three-masted sailing ship flies the English flag beside the island's steep coast. That is why people search "saint helena flag bird": the bird is the wirebird 🐦, and the ship ⛵ recalls the East India Company vessels that called here for generations. The colours as hearts are 💙❤️🤍, and 👑 stands for the Crown: the King is head of state, as in every British Overseas Territory.

Saint Helena symbols: the wirebird, Jonathan and Jacob's Ladder

🐦 Bird is the wirebird, St Helena's national bird, a small plover named for its thin, wiry legs. It lives nowhere else on Earth and is the island's last surviving endemic land bird, so it appears on the flag, the coins and the stamps. No emoji shows a plover, so 🐦 does the job, and 🇸🇭🐦 reads at once to a Saint.

🐢 Turtle on St Helena means Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise who arrived in 1882 and lives on the lawn of Plantation House, the Governor's residence. He is thought to have hatched around 1832, which makes him the oldest known living land animal, and his birthday wishes travel the world with 🐢🎂.

🪜 Ladder is Jacob's Ladder, a straight stairway of 699 steps climbing the cliff from Jamestown to Ladder Hill. It was built in 1829 as an inclined railway to haul goods up the hill, and when that was taken away the steps stayed; locals and visitors race up it, and children famously slide down the rails.

The island's capital, Jamestown, squeezes into a narrow valley between cliffs. 🏰 is the Castle, the government offices at the sea end of Main Street, and ⛪ is St James' Church of 1774, often called the oldest Anglican church in the southern hemisphere.

Napoleon on St Helena: exile, Longwood and the empty tomb

Most of the world knows St Helena as the island where Napoleon Bonaparte was sent after Waterloo. He landed in October 1815 and lived at Longwood House 🏡, a damp, wind-blown house on a plateau inland, until his death there on 5 May 1821. He was buried in the quiet Sane Valley 🪦, and his body was taken back to France in 1840 before being finally laid to rest at Les Invalides in Paris in 1861, so the tomb on the island is empty.

Longwood House, the tomb and the Briars Pavilion, where he stayed in his first weeks, are owned by France 🇫🇷 and kept as a museum. There is no Napoleon emoji; people paste 🇫🇷🦅 for the imperial eagle of his empire, 🏡 for Longwood and 🇸🇭🇫🇷 for the exile itself.

He was not the island's only exile. The Zulu king Dinuzulu was held here in the 1890s, and thousands of Boer prisoners of war were kept in two camps, at Deadwood Plain and Broadbottom, during the Boer War 🇿🇦. In the 19th century the Royal Navy's anti-slavery patrols brought about 25,000 freed Africans to St Helena, landing them at depots in Rupert's Valley and Lemon Valley; about 8,000 died, and most are buried in Rupert's Valley.

St Helena currency: £ and the St Helena pound

St Helena's currency is the St Helena pound (code SHP), issued by the island's government and worth exactly one British pound. Both are written with the pound sign £, so a price reads £5; 💷 is the pound banknote emoji and 🪙 a coin. The island's own notes and coins show its local animals and plants.Searches for "st helena currency to naira", "to rand", "to USD" or "to INR" all have one answer: convert as you would British pounds.

To type £: on a UK keyboard it is Shift + 3; on Windows with a US keyboard hold Alt and type 0163 on the number pad; on a Mac with a US layout press Option + 3; in HTML write £. On a phone, long-press the $ key or copy £ from the grid above.

The island speaks English, with its own St Helenian accent and words, so you need no letters beyond plain A–Z; our English collection covers English punctuation and quotation marks.

Diana's Peak, whale sharks and island nature

St Helena is the top of an old volcano 🌋 in the South Atlantic, about 122 square kilometres, nearly 2,000 km off the coast of south-west Africa. Its edge is bare cliff 🪨 dropping into the sea 🌊, but the middle is green: Diana's Peak ⛰️, the highest point at about 820 m, is a national park 🏞️ of cloud forest with tree ferns and the island's own plants 🌿, often in mist ☁️🌫️. Gumwoods, ebony and other endemics are being grown back from a few survivors 🌱. The trade wind 🌬️ blows all year, and after rain a stream falls down the Heart-Shaped Waterfall above Jamestown 💧❤️.

The island's walks have a tradition of their own: the Post Box Walks 🥾📮, routes that end at a box holding a stamp to print in your book. Feral and working donkeys 🫏 once carried the island's goods up its steep roads, and a donkey sanctuary still looks after them.

In the sea, whale sharks 🦈 gather off the island in the southern summer, roughly December to April, and snorkellers 🤿 swim beside them; humpback whales 🐋 pass from about June to December, and dolphins 🐬 live in the island's waters all year. Divers also visit the wreck of the Papanui in James Bay, among shoals of fish 🐟🐠.

St Helena coffee, fishcakes and island life

☕ St Helena coffee is the island's famous export: a Green Tipped Bourbon Arabica grown from seed brought from Yemen in the 1730s, small in quantity and sold as one of the world's rarest coffees 🫘. Napoleon is said to have praised it. Next to it stands Tungi 🌵🥃, a spirit distilled from the fruit of the prickly pear cactus that grows wild on the dry slopes.

Saints eat a lot of fish 🎣🐟: tuna is caught by pole and line, and the island's spicy fishcakes 🌶️ and plo, a spiced rice dish with meat or fish 🍚, are what visitors are told to try. Football ⚽ and cricket 🏏 are played on Francis Plain, and the golf course ⛳ at Longwood is one of the most remote in the world.

For centuries everything came by ship 🚢⚓. The RMS St Helena 🛳️, the last working Royal Mail Ship, sailed from Cape Town until 2018; since 2017 an airport has given the island scheduled flights ✈️🛬🛫, usually from Johannesburg. Edmond Halley set up a telescope 🔭 here in 1677 to chart the southern stars ⭐, the island's stamps ✉️ are prized by collectors, and its internet domain .sh 🌐 is a favourite of programmers, because .sh is also the ending of a shell script. 21 May, St Helena's Day, is the island's own holiday, marking the traditional discovery date in 1502; historians dispute the exact date and origin of the island's name.