Flag: Honduras Emoji

The flag of Honduras. A horizontal navy-white-navy triband with five equal navy-blue five-pointed stars arranged in an X pattern on the central white band. No coat of arms, no volcanoes, no Phrygian cap. Of all the Central American blue-white flags, Honduras's is the cleanest and most graphic. The five stars stand for the five founding member states of the 1823 Federal Republic of Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The arrangement is an explicit hope, embedded in the flag itself, that the federation might someday reunify.

The emoji sequences regional indicators H and N (U+1F1EDU+1F1ED + U+1F1F3U+1F1F3). Flag-capable platforms render the Bandera Nacional; platforms without flag emoji support fall back to the letters HN. Shipped with Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

On social, 🇭🇳 is driven by three big communities: Hondurans at home, the roughly 1.1 million Honduran-origin population in the United States (concentrated in Miami, Houston, New Orleans, and New York), and the international diving and reef-travel community that knows Honduras as the home of the Bay Islands (Roatán, Utila, Guanaja), some of the best and cheapest scuba destinations in the Western Hemisphere.

The flag went through a high-profile shade change in 2022 under President Xiomara Castro, who enforced the legally-mandated turquoise blue that had been on the books since 1949 but never actually flown. On January 27, 2026, her successor reverted the shade back to navy blue. Four years of turquoise, then back. The emoji renders navy in most fonts.

🇭🇳 splits cleanly across domestic, diaspora, travel, and sports audiences. Volume peaks are predictable.

Honduran-American diaspora is the biggest US-based driver. Around 1.1 million Hondurans live in the US, with Miami, New Orleans (historically the hub because of the 20th-century banana-boat trade), Houston, and Long Island as the major communities. New Orleans had the largest Honduran community in the US for most of the 20th century, a legacy of the Standard Fruit and United Fruit shipping lines that ran directly from La Ceiba to New Orleans. Flag content spikes around September 15 Independence Day and around baleada food-culture posts.

Baleadas are Honduras's most TikTok-friendly dish: a thick flour tortilla folded over refried beans, crema, and queso duro. The 🇭🇳🫓 pair anchors food content the same way 🇸🇻🫓 does for pupusas, though at smaller scale.

Football fandom is massive. Club Deportivo Olimpia (Tegucigalpa) and Club Motagua are Honduras's traditional big two, with a rivalry that runs through Honduran Instagram every Clásico weekend. The national team (La Bicolor, La H) spikes hard around Concacaf qualifiers and Gold Cup runs. Michael Chirinos, Rigoberto Rivas, and historically David Suazo drive individual spikes.

Dive tourism is global. Roatán, Utila, and Guanaja sit on the second-largest barrier reef in the world (the Mesoamerican Reef, shared with Belize and Mexico). Utila is famous as one of the cheapest places in the world to get open-water certified. The 🇭🇳🤿 pair shows up across dive-Instagram every week.

Garífuna culture drives cultural posts around November 19 (Garífuna Settlement Day) in Honduras and across the diaspora. The Garinagu are an Afro-indigenous people who arrived in Honduras from Saint Vincent in 1797; punta music is their musical export.

2022-2026 flag-color news cycle. The turquoise blue shift under Castro, and the January 2026 reversion to navy, both drove spikes of 🇭🇳 in international vexillology and political news coverage.

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  Capital: Tegucigalpa (14.07°N, 87.19°W)
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  Population: ~10.6 million (2025)
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  Area: 112,492 km²
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  Currency: Lempira (HNL, L)
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  Languages: Spanish (primary), Garífuna, Miskito, English (Bay Islands)
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  Calling code: +504
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  Time zone: CST (UTC-6), no DST
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  Internet TLD: .hn

Foods that show up next to 🇭🇳

Landmarks that anchor travel content

Honduras's flag is one of the most historically consistent in Central America. The design has barely changed since 1866, making it one of the oldest continuously-used Central American flags. The only recent drama has been over exactly which shade of blue to paint it.

The 1823 UPCA origin. Honduras joined the Federal Republic of Central America at its founding in 1823 and used the federation's blue-white-blue banner until the federation's dissolution in 1838-1841.

The 1866 design. On February 16, 1866, Liberal president José María Medina issued a decree establishing Honduras's post-federation national flag. The design kept the familiar horizontal triband but added five five-pointed blue stars in an X pattern on the central white band. The arrangement is explicit symbolism: each star stands for one founding UPCA member (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica), and the X configuration reads as 'all equal, none central, still holding together.' Panama and Belize are not included because they weren't independent at the time and weren't UPCA members.

The 1898 federation attempt. Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador briefly formed the Greater Republic of Central America in 1896-1898. During that period Honduras flew a modified federation flag. The attempt collapsed after a coup in El Salvador in November 1898, and Honduras's 1866 design returned.

The 1949 decree. Article 2 of the 1949 flag decree defined the official blue shade as 'turquoise' (turquesa). The text was clear; the practice was different. For the next 73 years, Honduras flew flags in dark navy blue, largely because the right-wing National Party (Partido Nacional) preferred the darker shade as their political color. The legal definition sat on the books, unused.

2022: Castro enforces the legal shade. President Xiomara Castro's inauguration on January 27, 2022 included a formal return to turquoise blue, based on a 2021 recommendation from the National Autonomous University of Honduras. Castro's LIBRE party framed the shift as 'returning the flag to its true colors' and as a repudiation of the previous National Party-era navy. For four years, Honduras flew turquoise.

2026: Back to navy. On January 27, 2026, the new administration reverted the official shade to navy blue. The legal text of the 1949 decree still says 'turquesa,' but in practice the flag is back to how it was flown from 1949 to 2022.

The emoji itself. Apple, Google, Twitter, Meta, and Microsoft all render 🇭🇳 in navy blue. None of the major font vendors updated their emoji to turquoise during the 2022-2026 window, meaning the 🇭🇳 emoji was briefly out of sync with the flying flag.

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  Second Sunday of May: Mother's Day: Major commercial holiday. Diaspora calls home to abuelita dominate Honduran social.
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  September 15: Independence Day: Shared with four Central American neighbors. Desfile de Antorchas (torch parade) on September 14 and school parades on the 15th.
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  October 3: Morazán Day: Honors General Francisco Morazán, last UPCA president and Honduras's national hero. Schools close; the five-flag Central American set shows up together.
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  October 21: Armed Forces Day: Día de las Fuerzas Armadas. Military parades in Tegucigalpa.
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  November 19: Garífuna Settlement Day: Commemorates the 1797 arrival of the Garinagu from Saint Vincent. Biggest cultural heritage day for the Garífuna-Honduran community and its NYC and LA diaspora.

• •Honduras's five stars stand for Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, the five original 1823 Federal Republic of Central America member states.
• •The 1949 decree legally defined the blue as turquoise, but the flag was flown in navy blue for 73 years. President Xiomara Castro enforced the legal shade in 2022; it reverted to navy in 2026.
• •Around 1.1 million Hondurans live in the US, roughly 10% of the global Honduran population.
• •Utila, one of Honduras's Bay Islands, is famous as one of the cheapest places in the world to get PADI open-water certified. Most gap-year divers first touch a regulator there.
• •Honduras's national animal is the white-tailed deer, featured on the 1-lempira banknote. National bird is the scarlet macaw, legally protected since 1993 after decades of poaching decimated wild populations.
• •The Garinagu (Garífuna) arrived in Honduras from Saint Vincent via Roatán on April 12, 1797. The date is now celebrated as Garífuna Settlement Day, November 19 in Honduras.
• •Former president Juan Orlando Hernández was extradited to the US in 2022 and convicted of drug trafficking in March 2024, making him the second former Latin American head of state (after Panama's Noriega) convicted in a US federal court.
• •Honduras's Bay Islands sit on the Mesoamerican Reef, the second-largest barrier reef in the world after Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The reef stretches 1,000 km from Mexico through Belize to Honduras.