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Royal Flags (Spain)

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Royal Standard / Guión de S.M. el Rey
by Santiago Dotor

Royal Standard
Heir Prince's Standard
César Manrique's proposals

See also:

Royal Standard

Guión de S.M. el Rey

Chris Pinette wrote, "Are there any royal flags currently used by the Spanish Royal House?". Yes. Both the King's and the Heir (Prince of Asturias)'s flags can be found in Calvo and Grávalos 1983 and I will try to make GIFs of both. They are square flags, dark blue (B+) field with the coat-of-arms in the middle. The King's coat-of-arms can be seen at the Spanish Royal Household Website. The lion should be purpure (purple) instead of gules (red) though.

The FOTW page on the Arms of Spain says, "It seems Juan Carlos uses as personal arms those of the last kings of Spain, Alfonso XII and Alfonso XIII, with the closed crown and the collar of the Golden Fleece". This not fully correct. The current royal arms incorporate the Burgundian saltire (to show that King Juan Carlos joins both the official and the Carlist claims to the throne), the yoke and arrows of the Catholic Kings (Elisabeth and Ferdinand) and the Golden Fleece collar.

Santiago Dotor, 12 November 1998

It should be pointed out that, unlike the British Royal Standard —which is in fact a banner-of-arms and should be termed Royal Banner—, this flag is indeed a royal standard since it consists of heraldical devices and/or badges displayed on a flag which are not a banner-of-arms. In Spain, however, it is termed guión, a term with a similar root to the English guidon. In Spanish, however, the term is reserved nowadays for the positional flag of a king or chief of state, even if in ancient times it was synonimous with the English meaning (nowadays cavalry and armoured units' flags are called estandartes).

Santiago Dotor, 21 October 1999

Heir Prince's Standard

Guión de S.A.R. el Príncipe de Asturias

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by Santiago Dotor

Spanish heraldry makes little if any use of cadency marks (like for instance the label on the Prince of Wales' coat-of-arms, making it different from the British sovereign's), so the only difference between the King's and the Heir Prince's arms is the crown. The King's coat-of-arms has a royal crown (ie. with 8 arches of which 5 are visible) while the Prince's one has only 4 arches of which 3 are visible.

Santiago Dotor, 12 November 1998 and 22 October 1999

The Spanish Official Bulletin published on 26th April 1971 the description of the Heir's Standard (at the time Prince Juan Carlos). After a detailed description of the shield, it added: "As symbols of the National Movement (a name given to the single party under the Francoist regime) the red cross of Burgundy behind the arms (...)".

Jaume Ollé, 28 August 1999

César Manrique's proposals

by António Martins

In page 16 of a number of Banderas are shown two flags that easily rank as the strangest (and ugliest!) hoistable stuff I've ever seen. Their designer, late Spanish architect/artist César Manrique, wrote in a letter to Spanish vexillogist Jesús Ruiz de Burgos:

I enclose one of the flags I've designed for the ship of His Majesty the King [of Spain]. With it I wanted to symbolize the very democratic Spanish monarchy. The main motives of this symbology are the sea, a fish, the beach and the Royal Crown reflected on the sea. The arrangement I made, transforming the colors and the shapes in a constituent part of the very sea symbology results, in my opinion, in a new conception of the very identity of a flag.

Illustrating this text were two drawings. I'm sending one of them as ES!MRQ1.GIF, using the FOTW pallette to colorize the FIAV symbols on the reproduction in Banderas. In this flag, the motives refered in the text are not visible. It is maybe some other flag of the reverse of the following (!!). I assumed the pole to be on the left side... The other image shows the motives referred in the text (sea, fish and crown), but I'm quite sure that it was errouneously printed upside down (like many real flags): I'm sending ES!MRQ2.GIF as it is, and ES!MRQ2A.GIF as the supposed corrected version. Ditto about colours and pole side. Since the flag on Banderas wasn't rectangular (!) and had a little indent, I used gray for the transparent, background color. Can't say "Hope you like'em!"... :-)

António Martins, 2 November 1998