Flag: Sint Maarten Emoji

The flag of Sint Maarten: two horizontal bands of cherry red over navy blue with a white triangle set at the hoist, charged with the Sint Maarten coat of arms. The shield shows the Philipsburg courthouse (the square white building in Wathey Square), the Dutch-French Friendship Monument (commemorating the 1648 Treaty of Concordia that partitioned the island), and a garland of yellow sage (the national flower). A brown pelican sits on the crest above, backed by a yellow sun. The Latin motto 'Semper progrediens' (Always progressing) runs on the ribbon below. Red stands for solidarity and courage; white for peace and friendliness; blue for the surrounding sea and sky; the orange border on the shield nods to the House of Orange.

Adopted on June 13, 1985, when a 17-year-old high-school student named Roselle Richardson beat 114 other public-competition entries. The flag flew as the territorial flag of Sint Maarten within the Netherlands Antilles federation until 10 October 2010, when Sint Maarten became a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in its own right. The 1985 design was kept unchanged. Sint Maarten is the Dutch southern half of the 87 km² island of Saint Martin); the northern 60% is the French collectivity of Saint-Martin (🇲🇫). At 87 km², it's the smallest landmass in the world shared by two sovereign entities.

Socially, 🇸🇽 runs on three engines that are unusually distinctive even by Caribbean standards. The first is Maho Beach at the edge of Princess Juliana International Airport's runway 10, where arriving planes cross above bathers' heads on short final. Jet-landing content is the island's most durable viral export. The second is cruise traffic through Great Bay: Sint Maarten is a top Caribbean cruise hub, and the Philipsburg Boardwalk is where thousands of day-visitors land each morning. The third is Hurricane Irma's devastation on September 6, 2017, with a Category 5 direct hit that damaged 90% of infrastructure, and the slow airport-and-island rebuild that finally delivered a reopened Princess Juliana terminal in November 2024. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015 as the regional indicator sequence U+1F1F8 U+1F1FDU+1F1F8 U+1F1FD.

🇸🇽 has three big posting windows. SXM Carnival (April into early May) is the island's Carnival window. Weeks of events at Festival Village on Pond Island just outside Philipsburg, closing with a Grand Parade and road march. Shared with French Saint-Martin but not simultaneous: the Dutch side runs post-Easter, the French side runs pre-Lent. Diaspora accounts in the Netherlands and the US East Coast carry the flag for the parade photos.

King's Day on April 27 lights up the whole Kingdom in orange. Boardwalk parades in Philipsburg; kids' games on Great Bay Beach; shared posting windows with 🇦🇼 Aruba, 🇨🇼 Curaçao, and 🇳🇱. This is the single cleanest 🇸🇽 + 🇳🇱 pairing of the year.

November 11 is Sint Maarten's Day, the saint-day of Martin of Tours) and the single most distinctive moment of the island's social calendar: shared between Dutch Sint Maarten and French Saint-Martin. A ceremony at the Friendship Monument at Cole Bay, bilateral officials, and a rare moment where both halves of the island raise each other's flags side by side. The only Caribbean flag combo where 🇸🇽 and 🇲🇫 fly together by design.

Underneath those windows runs the heaviest per-capita Instagram feed of any Caribbean flag: Maho Beach. Tourists lined up in the sand as a KLM 777 or Air France A350 passes 15 meters above. The viral video count runs into the hundreds of millions across TikTok and YouTube. The tragic July 12, 2017 jet-blast death of a New Zealand tourist briefly tempered the energy but didn't slow it down. Post-Irma reconstruction posts were a sustained subtext through 2023 and 2024, reaching their closure when Princess Juliana's fully rebuilt terminal opened November 2024.

• 🏛️
  Capital: Philipsburg. On Great Bay; the waterfront Boardwalk is the cruise-day-visitor landing strip.
• 👥
  Population: ~42,500 (2024 est.). French Saint-Martin adds roughly 32,000 on the northern half.
• 🗺️
  Area: 34 km² (13 sq mi). The Dutch southern half of the 87 km² Saint Martin island.
• 💱
  Currency: Caribbean guilder (XCG) since July 1, 2025, replacing the Netherlands Antillean guilder. Pegged at 1.79 to USD.
• 🗣️
  Languages: Dutch (official), English (official; daily language of most residents), with Papiamento, Spanish, and French widely spoken.
• 🏛️
  Government: Constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 10-10-10 (October 10, 2010). 15-seat Staten parliament, Prime Minister, Governor appointed by the Dutch Crown.
• 📞
  Calling code: +1-721 (North American Numbering Plan; separate from the French side's +590).
• ⏰
  Time zone: AST (UTC-4), no daylight saving.
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .sx (assigned 2010 after the Netherlands Antilles .an TLD was retired).

Foods that show up next to 🇸🇽

Landmarks that anchor travel content

Saint Martin is a 87 km² volcanic island with an unusually strategic geography: salt ponds, deep anchorages at Great Bay (south) and Baie de Marigot (north), and a position near the main sailing routes up the Antillean arc. The Arawak-speaking Igneri and later Kalinago) populated the island before European contact. Christopher Columbus sighted it on November 11, 1493 (Saint Martin's feast day, which gave the island its name) and sailed past.

The Dutch settled at Great Bay in the 1620s to exploit the island's salt pans, building Fort Amsterdam in 1631. Spanish forces captured the Dutch outpost in 1633 and held it until 1648. When Spain abandoned Saint Martin in 1648, Dutch and French forces simultaneously rushed in and avoided open war by signing the Treaty of Concordia on Concordia Hill on March 23, 1648. Folklore says the border was drawn by having a Dutchman and a Frenchman walk in opposite directions around the island, with the Frenchman outrunning the Dutchman (the French side is slightly larger at 53 km² to the Dutch side's 34 km²). The reality was less theatrical and turned on which sides the islanders and settlers preferred.

Slavery was abolished by the French in 1848 and the Dutch in 1863. Keti Koti (July 1) is the abolition holiday. In the mid-20th century Sint Maarten was a salt-and-cotton outpost, sparsely populated and run as one of the six territories of the Netherlands Antilles. The transformation came with tourism: Princess Juliana Airport opened in 1943 as a US wartime airstrip, grew through the 1960s and 70s, and by 2000 was the second-busiest airport in the Caribbean after Puerto Rico.

Sint Maarten pushed for constituent-country status through the 1990s and 2000s. On 10-10-10, the Netherlands Antilles dissolved; Sint Maarten became its own country alongside Aruba, Curaçao, and the Netherlands. Hurricane Irma destroyed the newly-independent country's infrastructure on September 6, 2017, a near-Category 5 direct hit. The rebuild ran through 2024, anchored by the Princess Juliana terminal reopening in November 2024.

• 🎉
  January 1: New Year's Day: Public holiday. Great Bay fireworks the night before.
• 🐣
  April 3 + 6, 2026: Good Friday and Easter Monday: Public holidays.
• 🎭
  April 15 to May 3, 2026: SXM Carnival: [Three-week window](https://www.sxmcarnival.com/) of events at Festival Village on Pond Island. Calypso Monarch, Soca Monarch, J'ouvert, Carnival Monday Grand Parade.
• 👑
  April 27: King's Day (Dia di Rey): Kingdom-wide holiday. Orange parades on the Philipsburg Boardwalk.
• 💪
  May 1: Labour Day: Public holiday.
• ✝️
  May 14, 2026: Ascension Day: Public holiday.
• ✊
  July 1: Emancipation Day (Keti Koti): Commemorates the [July 1, 1863 abolition of slavery](https://www.rnw.org/archive/keti-koti-day-celebrating-the-abolition-slavery-dutch-caribbean) in the Dutch Caribbean.
• 📜
  October 10: Constitution Day (10-10-10 Anniversary): Marks Sint Maarten becoming a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
• 🤝
  November 11: Sint Maarten's Day: Shared with French Saint-Martin. Ceremony at the Friendship Monument at Cole Bay. The one day a year when 🇸🇽 and 🇲🇫 fly together officially.
• 📜
  December 15: Kingdom Day: Commemorates the 1954 Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
• 🎄
  December 25 + 26: Christmas Day and Boxing Day (Tweede Kerstdag).

• •Sint Maarten and Saint-Martin together make up the smallest landmass in the world shared by two sovereign entities). 87 km² of island shared between the Netherlands (34 km²) and France (53 km²).
• •The 1648 Treaty of Concordia is one of the oldest continuously honored border agreements in the Americas. The boundary has shifted 16 times in various wars and treaties, but the basic partition has held for 378 years.
• •Roselle Richardson was 17 years old when she won the 1985 flag design competition. Her entry beat 114 others. Sint Maarten is the only constituent country in the Kingdom with a flag designed by a high-school student.
• •Sint Maarten has no passport or customs control on the border with French Saint-Martin. You cross via a small obelisk-marked gate at Cole Bay (Friendship Monument) or at Oyster Pond. Your mobile phone reception switches carriers; nothing else changes.
• •Princess Juliana International Airport's Runway 10 is only 2,300 meters (7,546 feet) long, which is why big jets clear Maho Beach at 10 to 15 meters altitude on final. The runway runs right up to the sand, producing the viral fence-and-plane shots that anchor the island's social presence.
• •Sint Maarten uses the Caribbean guilder (XCG) since July 1, 2025 (shared with Curaçao). The French side uses the euro. Tourists end up with two currencies in the same day.
• •Guavaberry is not a guava. It's Myrciaria floribunda, a small wild bitter berry native to the island and traditionally macerated in rum with brown sugar and spices to make the Christmas liqueur that now doubles as a year-round tourist gift.
• •Sint Maarten is 89% built up with tourism infrastructure: resorts on Great Bay, Simpson Bay, Mullet Bay, and Dawn Beach, plus the Casino district in Maho. Tourism accounts for roughly half of the country's economic output, which is why Hurricane Irma's 2017 damage was catastrophic.

• •🇸🇽 is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1F8U+1F1F8 (S) + U+1F1FDU+1F1FD (X). ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code: SXSX.
• •Shortcode: :flag_sx::flag_sx: or :sint_maarten::sint_maarten: on most platforms.
• •The .sx country-code TLD was assigned in 2010 after the Netherlands Antilles .an TLD retired. It was auctioned as a generic-like TLD and is used widely for Belgian and Saxon businesses in addition to Sint Maarten businesses.

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