Venezuela Emoji & Symbols

The Venezuela flag emoji 🇻🇪 is not a single character. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇻 and 🇪, for the country code VE (U+1F1FB U+1F1EA), and phones and apps that support flags draw the pair as the flag. That is why the same emoji appears on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and Instagram, and why on Windows, which has no flag emoji in its own font, you may see the two letters "VE" instead. The text still pastes correctly and shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

The flag has three equal stripes of yellow, blue and red with an arc of eight white stars in the blue. The colours go back to the flag Francisco de Miranda raised in 1806. For a long time the arc had seven stars, for the seven provinces that declared independence in 1811; an eighth star for the province of Guayana, which Simón Bolívar had decreed in 1817, was added in 2006. Venezuelans repeat the colours with 💛💙❤️ hearts or 🟨🟦🟥 squares when the flag alone is not enough, and string eight ⭐ or ★ to stand for the stars.

Flag Day, the Día de la Bandera, is 3 August, the date Miranda landed at La Vela de Coro with the flag in 1806. The big flag days for emoji, though, are Independence Day on 5 July and Bolívar's birthday on 24 July, when 🇻🇪 fills profile names and stories.

Venezuelan national symbols and nature in emoji

The national bird is the turpial, a black, orange and white troupial with a loud whistling song; there is no turpial emoji, so people use 🐦 together with 🧡 or 🖤. The scarlet and blue-and-gold macaws that fly over Caracas in noisy flocks are 🦜. The national tree is the araguaney, which turns the hills bright yellow at the end of the dry season: 🌳💛 or 🌼. The national flower is an orchid, Cattleya mossiae, which has no emoji of its own. On the coat of arms a white horse 🐎 gallops beneath a wheat sheaf 🌾 that stands for the unity of the states.

🏞️ and 💧 are the usual emoji for Angel Falls in Canaima National Park, the highest uninterrupted waterfall on Earth, and ⛰️ for the flat-topped tepuis it falls from, such as Auyán-tepui and Roraima. 🏔️ and 🚠 stand for Mérida in the Andes, where Pico Bolívar keeps its snow and the Mukumbarí cable car climbs from the city toward the peaks.

🌩️⚡ is the Catatumbo lightning, the near-silent storm that flickers over the southern end of Lake Maracaibo on most nights of the year, so famous that the flag of Zulia state carries a lightning bolt. 🏝️ 🏖️ 🐠 are the coral cays of Los Roques and the beaches of Margarita Island, 🏜️ the sand dunes of Coro, 🛶 the Orinoco and its delta, 🐄 🤠 the cattle plains of Los Llanos, and 🛢️ the oil that has shaped the economy for a century; Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world.

Wildlife needs stand-ins: 🐆 for the jaguar, 🐊 for the Orinoco crocodile, 🐍 for the anaconda, 🐬 for the pink river dolphin, the tonina, 🦦 for the giant otter, 🐢 for the arrau turtle, 🐒 for the howler monkey whose roar carries through the forest, and 🦩 for the flamingos of the Caribbean lagoons.

Venezuelan food emoji: arepas, hallacas and tequeños

There is no arepa emoji, but 🫓 Flatbread was added in 2020 with "arepa" among its keywords, and Venezuelans have made it theirs: 🫓🧀 for an arepa with cheese, 🫓🍗🥑 for the reina pepiada, the chicken and avocado arepa. Colombians use the same emoji for their own arepas, a friendly argument the two countries never finish.

🫔 Tamale is the closest emoji to the hallaca, the Christmas parcel of corn dough filled with a meat stew, olives and raisins and wrapped in plantain leaves; families make dozens together in December and swap them with neighbours. 🧀 is tequeños, the fried cheese sticks no party is without, and also queso de mano and queso llanero. 🌽🧀 is a cachapa, the sweet corn pancake folded over soft cheese, 🥟 an empanada, and 🍞 the pan de jamón, the Christmas bread rolled around ham, olives and raisins.

The national dish, pabellón criollo, is 🍚🫘🥩🍌: white rice, black beans, shredded beef and fried sweet plantain. 🥑 doubles as guasacaca, the avocado sauce for grilled meat. For dessert, 🍮 is quesillo, Venezuela's flan, and 🍫 the country's prized cacao. In the glass, ☕ is a guayoyo or a marrón, 🍋 papelón con limón, 🍺 a cold beer, 🥃 Venezuelan rum and 🥭🥥 fresh juice and cocada.

Baseball, the Vinotinto and Venezuelan music

⚾ is the Venezuelan sports emoji. Baseball is the national passion: the winter league fills stadiums from October, and stars such as Miguel Cabrera, José Altuve and Ronald Acuña Jr. turned 🇻🇪⚾ into a familiar sight in Major League Baseball. Football fans cheer the national team, called La Vinotinto after its burgundy shirt, with ⚽🍷🇻🇪. 🏀 and 🥊 have strong followings too, 🏅 belongs to Yulimar Rojas, Olympic triple jump champion in Tokyo with a world record, and 👑 to Miss Venezuela, whose winners have taken the Miss Universe crown seven times.

The national dance is the joropo of the plains, played on the arpa llanera 🪉, the four-string cuatro (🎸 is the nearest emoji) and maracas 🪇, with the couple 💃🕺 tapping out fast zapateo steps and the singer often a llanero 🤠. 🥁 is the drumming of Barlovento for the feast of San Juan, and 🎻 stands for El Sistema, the youth orchestra network founded in 1975 that trained the conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

Venezuelan holidays in emoji: Christmas, New Year and Carnival

Christmas is the longest celebration of the year. 🎄🥁🪇🎶 is gaita season, the upbeat Christmas music from Zulia; 🫔 is hallaca-making day; and 🛼 is the Caracas patinatas, when children roller-skate through the streets to the early-morning Misas de Aguinaldo ⛪. Presents 🎁 traditionally come from the Niño Jesús on Christmas Eve.

At New Year 🎆, Venezuelans eat twelve grapes 🍇 at the twelve strokes of midnight, one wish for each month, and some walk around the block with an empty suitcase 🧳 to bring a year of travel. 🎭 is Carnival, with the calypso of El Callao, and 👹 the painted masks of the Diablos Danzantes de Yare, the Dancing Devils who dance at Corpus Christi and are on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage.

Millions of Venezuelans now live abroad, and ✈️🇻🇪 and 🫂 carry a lot in their chats: the trip home, the reunion at the airport, the hug after years apart.

How to write Venezuelan Spanish and the bolívar: ñ, ¿, ¡ and Bs.

Venezuela's national language is Spanish, and CLDR estimates that about 26 million of the country's roughly 28.5 million people speak it; the 1999 constitution also gives the indigenous languages, such as Wayuunaiki, Warao and Pemón, official status for their peoples. Writing it needs ñ (año, mañana, the Venezuelan word ñapa for a little extra thrown in), the acute accents á é í ó ú that mark stress (arepa has none, but café, Bolívar and Mérida do), ü in words such as pingüino, and the opening ¿ and ¡ that start every question and exclamation: ¡Épale, chamo! ¿Qué más? The full alphabet is in our Spanish Letters & Accents collection.

To type them on Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad 164 for ñ, 165 for Ñ, 160 á, 130 é, 161 í, 162 ó, 163 ú, 129 ü, 168 ¿ and 173 ¡. On a Mac press Option + N then N for ñ, Option + E then a vowel for an acute accent, Option + U then u for ü, Option + 1 for ¡ and Option + Shift + ? for ¿. On a phone, long-press n, a vowel, ? or ! to see the Spanish forms; Latin American keyboards have an Ñ key of their own.

The currency is the bolívar, named after Simón Bolívar, with the code VES. It has no Unicode sign of its own: prices are written with the abbreviation Bs., as in Bs. 1.250,00, with a point for thousands and a comma for decimals. US dollars are widely used in everyday shopping, so $ and 💵 appear on menus and in chats alongside Bs., and 💱 is the emoji for the exchange rate everyone checks.