Flag: St. Vincent & Grenadines Emoji

The flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines: a Canadian pale triband with blue, gold, and green vertical bands, charged with three green diamonds arranged in a V at the center of the gold band. The V-shape is the first letter of Vincent and a nod to the country's tourism slogan, Gems of the Antilles. The three diamonds stand for St Vincent itself plus the two main Grenadine island groups. Blue represents sky and sea, gold represents sand and the 'bright spirit of the islanders,' and green represents the island's dense tropical vegetation.

The current design was adopted on October 12, 1985, replacing a 1979 independence flag that carried the country's coat of arms on a breadfruit leaf. The redesign was commissioned from Swiss graphic artist Julien van der Wal, known for his flag of the Canton of Geneva and his pictograms for the Olympic Games. His brief was to modernize the original while keeping the same color logic. He replaced the busy emblem with the clean V of diamonds, turning the flag into one of the most graphically precise in the Caribbean.

Socially, 🇻🇨 does most of its work from the Vincentian diaspora. There are more Vincentians in Brooklyn, Toronto, and the UK than there are on the islands themselves, and 🇻🇨 threads through identity posts, calypso/soca shares, and CARICOM solidarity. The flag also spikes around Vincy Mas carnival in late June and early July, and it had its biggest international moment in April 2021 when La Soufrière erupted and evacuation posts flooded every Caribbean feed. Added to Emoji 2.0 in 2015 as the regional indicator sequence U+1F1FB U+1F1E8U+1F1FB U+1F1E8.

🇻🇨 has three clear peaks. The biggest is Vincy Mas, the country's carnival, which runs from late June through the first week of July. J'ouvert kicks off Carnival Monday at 4am, and the Mardi Gras Parade of the Bands on Tuesday floods Kingstown with feather-and-beads costumes. The diaspora in Brooklyn, Toronto, and London posts along with the island in real time.

The second peak is Independence Day on October 27, which drives a concentrated flag wave from Vincentian community centers in Flatbush (Brooklyn), Tottenham (North London), and Rexdale (Toronto). The third is the Grenadines travel bucket, especially Bequia and Mustique, which are high-end enough to generate a steady trickle of superyacht-and-beach Instagram content with the flag.

There's also an episodic news-cycle peak. On April 9, 2021, La Soufrière erupted for the first time in 40 years, sending an ash plume 10 km up, and roughly 16,000 people were evacuated. 🇻🇨 trended globally for weeks on relief posts and CARICOM solidarity threads. The eruption is still fresh in the Vincentian public consciousness.

• 🏛️
  Capital: Kingstown, on the southwest coast of St Vincent
• 👥
  Population: ~110,800 (2024 est.)
• 🗺️
  Area: 389 km² (St Vincent 344; Grenadines 45 across ~30 inhabited islands)
• 💵
  Currency: East Caribbean dollar (XCD), pegged at 2.70 to USD since 1976
• 🗣️
  Languages: English (official); Vincentian Creole spoken daily
• 📞
  Calling code: +1-784 (North American Numbering Plan)
• ⏰
  Time zone: AST (UTC-4), no daylight saving
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .vc (also used by venture capital firms)

Foods that show up next to 🇻🇨

Landmarks that anchor travel content

Saint Vincent gained independence from the UK on October 27, 1979. The first independence flag was blue-yellow-green with a breadfruit-leaf cartouche carrying the coat of arms. It was designed in the rush of independence and, by all accounts, nobody really liked it. Too busy, too hard to reproduce, not distinctive on a flagpole from a distance.

By 1985 the government had commissioned a redesign from Julien van der Wal, a Geneva-based graphic artist. Van der Wal is an odd thread in Caribbean vexillology: he's also the designer of the Canton of Geneva's cantonal flag, and he did pictogram work for the Olympic Games. His brief was to keep the blue-gold-green color logic but strip out the busy emblem. His solution was to take the letter V of 'Vincent,' render it as three diamonds (a nod to the 'Gems of the Antilles' tourism slogan), and center them on the gold band. Three diamonds for three island groupings: the main island of St Vincent, plus the Grenadines, which subdivide into a northern and a southern chain.

The new flag was formally adopted on October 12, 1985. Van der Wal's design is now considered one of the cleanest post-colonial flags in the Caribbean, deliberately engineered to read well at very small sizes. That legibility matters: as an emoji, 🇻🇨 keeps its V at a glance while flags with dense coats of arms often turn to a smudge.

• 🎉
  January 1: New Year's Day: Public holiday. Countdown in Kingstown harbour.
• ⚔️
  January 22: National Heroes Day: Honors Joseph Chatoyer, the Garifuna paramount chief killed fighting the British in 1795 and the country's sole national hero.
• ⛵
  April 3 to 6, 2026: Easter window: Good Friday, Easter Monday. Bequia Easter Regatta runs from Friday through Monday.
• ⚒️
  May 1, 2026: Labour Day: Trade union marches in Kingstown.
• ☀️
  May 25, 2026: Whit Monday: Pentecost Monday.
• 🎭
  June 26 to July 7, 2026: Vincy Mas: [Carnival season](https://carnivalvibez.com/vincymas/). Soca Monarch, Miss Carnival, Mardi Gras Parade of the Bands, and J'ouvert at 4am on Monday July 6. Peak 🇻🇨 window of the year.
• 🔥
  July 6, 2026: Vincy Mas Monday: J'ouvert morning, Carnival Monday on the road.
• 💃
  July 7, 2026: Vincy Mas Tuesday: Parade of the Bands, full-costume Mardi Gras through Kingstown.
• ✊
  August 3, 2026: Emancipation Day: First Monday of August. Commemorates the 1834 abolition of slavery across the British Caribbean.
• 🇻🇨
  October 27, 2026: Independence Day: Commemorates independence from the UK on October 27, 1979. Flag-raising at Victoria Park, parade through Kingstown.
• 🎄
  December 25 and 26: Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

• •The three green diamonds on the flag are arranged in a V to spell out both 'Vincent' and the country's tourism nickname, Gems of the Antilles.
• •The flag was designed by a Swiss graphic artist, Julien van der Wal, who also designed the flag of the Canton of Geneva and did pictogram work for the Olympic Games.
• •The Saint Vincent Botanical Gardens, founded in 1765, is the oldest botanical garden in the Western Hemisphere. It still holds descendants of the original breadfruit trees delivered by Captain Bligh on the HMS Providence in 1793.
• •La Soufrière erupted explosively on April 9, 2021, sending an ash plume 10 km (32,000 ft) into the sky. Roughly 16,000 people were evacuated, and ash fell on Barbados 190 km to the east.
• •The Grenadines' southern islands (Bequia, Mustique, Canouan, Mayreau, Union Island) are a sailor's rite of passage. Bequia's annual Easter Regatta draws boats from across the Atlantic.

• •🇻🇨 is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1FBU+1F1FB (V) + U+1F1E8U+1F1E8 (C). ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code: VCVC.
• •Shortcode: :flag_vc::flag_vc: or :st_vincent_grenadines::st_vincent_grenadines: on most platforms.
• •The .vc.vc top-level domain is used by venture-capital brands, which can skew Saint Vincent-related search traffic.

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