What 🇨🇼 means
Curaçao, a self-governing island country inside the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Curaçao lies in the southern Caribbean about 65 km off Venezuela, the middle of the three "ABC islands" with Aruba and Bonaire. Around 150,000 people live there. Most speak Papiamentu, a Creole language that blends Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and African roots; Dutch and English are official too, and in Papiamentu the island is Kòrsou. The capital, Willemstad, is known for the row of pastel Dutch-gabled houses along its harbour, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since 2010 the island has run its own affairs as one of the four countries of the kingdom, alongside the Netherlands, Aruba and Sint Maarten, with the Dutch king as head of state.
The flag, adopted in 1984, is dark blue with a yellow horizontal stripe set a little below the centre and two white five-pointed stars in the top corner by the hoist, the smaller one above and left of the larger. Officially the blue is the sea and the sky, parted by the yellow of the sun; the two stars are Curaçao and its small uninhabited neighbour Klein Curaçao, and their five points recall the five continents the islanders' ancestors came from. Flag Day is celebrated on 2 July.
What does it mean when someone sends 🇨🇼?
Usually a holiday, home or heritage, or support for Curaçao's football team.
The commonest use is travel: a flag next to beach photos, a flight time or a countdown means someone is going to, or already on, Curaçao, a popular sun, diving and cruise destination, especially for Dutch and North American visitors. In a profile or a family group it marks where someone is from. A large Curaçaoan community lives in the Netherlands, and many people pair 🇨🇼 with to show both halves of their story.
Football gave the flag a much wider audience. Curaçao's national team qualified for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the smallest nation by population ever to reach the tournament, so through 2026 the flag turned up in match threads and celebrations next to the flags of far bigger countries. A flag in a bio shows attachment, not citizenship: fans, expats and former holidaymakers wear it too.
Neutral and friendly: a place marker that turns warm or proud in profiles and football chat.
Don't send it for Aruba, Bonaire or the Caribbean in general; islanders notice.
🇨🇼 on the world map
Part of collections
What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsA trip to Curaçao: planned, under way or fondly remembered.
Don't confuse it with
3
Related characters
3
Combination ideas
7Worth knowing
- Blue Curaçao, the electric-blue cocktail liqueur, is named after the island: it is flavoured with the dried peel of the laraha, a bitter orange that grows there and is too sour to eat.
- The second, smaller star on the flag is Klein Curaçao, an uninhabited islet south-east of the main island, visited mostly by day-trip boats and nesting sea turtles.
Questions people ask
4How do you pronounce Curaçao?
Roughly "CURE-a-sow", with "sow" rhyming with "now"; the ç is an s sound. In Dutch it sounds closer to "kuu-raa-SAU", and in Papiamentu the island is Kòrsou.
Is Curaçao its own country or part of the Netherlands?
Both, in a sense. It is a self-governing country with its own parliament and flag, but it belongs to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which handles defence and foreign affairs, and its people are Dutch citizens.
Does 🇨🇼 mean the blue drink?
No. The flag means the island. Blue Curaçao liqueur is named after it, so a cocktail post might carry the flag as a joke, but on its own the emoji is about the place.
Why is the code CW and not CU?
CU was already Cuba. When Curaçao became a country in 2010 it received the code CW, and the flag emoji is simply the letters C and W joined.
More like this
16
Collections with 🇨🇼
7
How to type or find 🇨🇼
- Also called
- Curacao flag · Kòrsou flag · CW flag
- Search it as
- Curaçao · curacao · CW · Kòrsou · blue flag two white stars yellow stripe · ABC islands · Dutch Caribbean
- Type it as
- :flag-cw:
- Around since
- 2015 · Emoji 2.0
- Shows up on
- Every phone · iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux
:flag-cw:Common shortcode in Slack, GitHub, Discord, Mattermost and other chat apps; a few apps use a different name.🇨🇼Codes and encoding2 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.