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Colours of the National Flag (Spain)

Meaning of the Colours
Colour Specifications

See also:

Coat-of-Arms
Second Spanish Republic 1931-1939 (red-yellow-purple flag)
Spain

Meaning of the Colours

The colours in the Spanish flag probably originated in the colours of the original Spanish kingdoms' coats-of-arms. Castile has a yellow castle on a red field, Leon has a purple -sometimes dark red- lion carrying a yellow crown on a white field, Catalonia/Aragon has four red vertical pallets on a yellow field, Navarre a yellow chain on a red field (I have deliberately ommitted a correct heraldic blason). There is no specific symbolism in any of those colours, except for the Catalan/Aragonese coat-of-arms, whose vertical red pallets are (according to legend) the marks left by Charles the Bald's fingers on his ally Wilfred (first Count of Barcelona)'s gold coloured shield, after the first dipped them in a lethal wound in Wilfred's chest. More details on this in the Catalonia page.

One can read all sorts of things like "red stands for the blood shed by Spaniards and yellow for the bright Spanish sun" or even "red and yellow stand for bulls' and bullfighters' blood on the sand of the bullfighting ring", but they are fictitious (and frequently nonsense).

Santiago Dotor, 18 November 1998

Colour Specifications

Santiago Dotor wrote: "The red colour is quoted in the Constitution as merely "red"". There is a specification of the colours to be used for the Spanish flag in the Spanish legislation. This is not Pantone but the CIELAB system. This is what can be read in the Boletín Oficial del Estado:

Color     Denominacion color        Tono H* en °   Croma C*   Claridad L*
Rojo      Rojo bandera              35.0           70.0       37.0
Amarillo  Amarillo gualda bandera   85.0           95.0       80.0

The International System CIE 1.931 is also mentioned:

Iluminente C
Denominacion color       Y      x       y
Rojo bandera             9.5    0.314   0.320
Amarillo gualda bandera  56.7   0.488   0.469

Pascal Vagnat, 25 September 1998

Santiago Dotor wrote, "do you know (...) RGB equivalents for the colour systems CIE-LAB or CIE-1931?" I tried to get these values into RGB to no success. I do not know these systems (meaning I've never even heard of them), but they sure seem to be colour producing systems (as opposed to "sample palette" colour identification systems), since each colour is not identified by a arbitrary number or other list entry, but rather determined by a set of values. Moreover CIE-LAB, using "shade" (tono), "color depth" (croma) and "brightness" (claridad), surely reminds of the HSB system, which stands for "hue", "saturation" and "bright". HSB is avaliable available as an option in PhotoShop and I tried the Spanish flag values reported by Pascal Vagnat, but the comeout was nonsense: light green and brown. I guess that CIE-LAB and HSB, while being "matemathically" similar (they use the same approach to colour determination), must have different "scales", the first component being completely arbitrary. It's like defining colours in RGB and RBG: 0-255-0 is red in the first and blue in the second...

António Martins, 30 June 1999

CIE stands for Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage, or International Commission on Illumination. This organization has defined several colorimetric standards, two of which are the CIE Lab and the CIE 1931, or Yxy. Both represent colours as the coordinates of a point in a three-dimensional space, in terms of three primary colors, just as the RGB or the HSB computer standards do. All of these systems use different coordinate axis, however.

In the Lab system, L is the luminance, or brightness, of the colour, and a-b are coordinates in a plane. This also can be expresed in polar form, as hue (H) and chroma (C), leading to the HCL specifications given for the Spanish flag. In the (year) 1931 standard, Y is also a kind of luminance, and x-y are again coordinates, in a different plane.

I don't have access right now to the conversion tables between the CIE standards and RGB, but there is an on-line utility to make the conversion. Using this, I found the following RGB equivalents:

              R         G         B
Red         165        23        25
Yellow      249       183         0

The conversion utility could have an error, as this equivalents appear somewhat off-colour in Photoshop. The red seems too dark, and the yellow is almost tangerine; it could be just a bad calibration of my monitor. By the way, there is an error in the Yxy specification given for the red colour. The above utility shows the x value as 0.61, approximately.

Juan Claudio Regidor, 18 November 1999