Flags of Spain

Kingdom of Spain

Who & why: Franco dies on 20 November 1975; his own chosen successor, King Juan Carlos I, oversees a remarkably peaceful transition to democracy rather than continuing the dictatorship, culminating in the 1978 constitution. Spain joins NATO in 1982 and the European Community in 1986.

What it represents: the same red-yellow-red field flown since 1785, with Franco's eagle removed in stages (1977) and the arms simplified to the current crowned shield with the Pillars of Hercules in 1981 — the flag's field never changed across monarchy, republic, civil war and dictatorship; only the emblem at its center did.

Spanish State (Francoist dictatorship)

Who & why: General Francisco Franco governs as Caudillo from his April 1939 victory until his death in November 1975 — thirty-six years of one-man rule, censorship, and repression of Catalan and Basque identity, softened only slightly by the "goulash"-style economic opening of the 1960s. Spain stays neutral in WWII but sends volunteers to fight the Soviets, and is admitted to the UN only in 1955.

What it represents: the same red-yellow-red field kept from the Restoration monarchy, now bearing the Águila de San Juan (Eagle of Saint John) — a black eagle displayed, adopted from the Catholic Monarchs' own heraldry — redesigned once in 1945 but never removed until after Franco's death.

Civil War: Nationalist Spain

Who & why: a military uprising led by Franco and other generals begins on 17–18 July 1936 against the elected Popular Front government, splitting the country into Nationalist and Republican zones for nearly three years of brutal conflict — over half a million dead, foreign intervention on both sides (Germany and Italy for the Nationalists, the Soviet Union and International Brigades for the Republic) — ending in Franco's victory on 1 April 1939.

What it represents: the Nationalists restored the pre-Republican red-yellow-red bicolor immediately in 1936, rejecting the Republic's purple tricolor, and in 1938 formally added the black eagle that would remain the state's emblem for the next thirty-seven years — the Republic itself kept flying its own purple-yellow-red flag in the territory it still held until the final defeat.

Second Spanish Republic

Who & why: municipal elections in April 1931 produce a landslide against the monarchy in the cities; King Alfonso XIII leaves the country without abdicating and the Republic is proclaimed on 14 April 1931. Five turbulent years of land reform, anticlerical legislation, and swinging elections between left and right coalitions follow, ending when the July 1936 military uprising fractures the country into civil war.

What it represents: a new purple stripe replaces the old top-red band — purple commemorating the historic Comuneros of Castile, a symbol of resistance to royal authority, deliberately breaking from the monarchy's own red-yellow-red — and the crown on the coat of arms is replaced with a mural (castellated) crown.

Kingdom of Spain (Restoration)

Who & why: General Martínez Campos's pronunciamiento of December 1874 restores Alfonso XII, Isabella II's son, ending the First Republic. The Restoration settlement establishes a stable, if narrowly oligarchic, two-party parliamentary system that lasts through Alfonso XIII's reign, surviving the 1898 loss of Cuba and the Philippines and Primo de Rivera's 1923–1930 military dictatorship-within-the-monarchy, before collapsing with the king's departure in 1931.

What it represents: the traditional red-yellow-red returns with the royal crown restored atop the arms, asserting continuity with the pre-1868 monarchy after both the Democratic Sexennium's experiments and the First Republic's brief interruption.

First Spanish Republic

Who & why: King Amadeo I, an Italian prince invited to the throne after Isabella II's 1868 ouster, abdicates in frustration on 11 February 1873; the Cortes proclaims a republic the same day. Barely twenty-two months old, it cycles through four presidents amid the Third Carlist War and the Cantonal Revolt before General Pavía's coup and Martínez Campos's pronunciamiento restore the Bourbons in December 1874.

What it represents: the same red-yellow-red field, simply stripped of the royal crown — the shortest-lived of Spain's several attempts at post-monarchical government, with no time to develop a fully distinct flag of its own before the Restoration reversed the change.

Kingdom of Spain (Ferdinand VII – Sexennium)

Who & why: Ferdinand VII returns from French captivity in 1814 and voids the liberal 1812 Constitution of Cádiz, restoring absolutism; his death in 1833 triggers the First Carlist War over his daughter Isabella II's right to inherit against her uncle Carlos. Isabella's own increasingly unpopular reign ends in the "Glorious Revolution" of September 1868, opening the "Democratic Sexennium" — a provisional government, then the short reign of the elected outsider king Amadeo I (1870–73) — before that experiment ends in republic.

What it represents: the 1785 red-yellow-red bicolor, formalized as the sole national flag by royal decree in 1843 under Isabella II, flies through this entire fifty-nine-year span of absolutism, civil war, and constitutional experimentation — the crowned arms briefly modified rather than removed even during the anti-Bourbon Sexennium, since the crown itself, not just its wearer, remained contested.

Kingdom of Spain (Joseph Bonaparte)

Who & why: Napoleon forces the abdications of both Charles IV and his son Ferdinand VII at Bayonne in May 1808 and installs his own brother Joseph as king, triggering the Peninsular War — a brutal six-year guerrilla and regular-army conflict, fought alongside British and Portuguese forces under Wellington, that gives the word "guerrilla" to the English language. Joseph is finally driven out after the 1813 Battle of Vitoria, and the 1814 Treaty of Valençay restores Ferdinand VII.

What it represents: Joseph kept the existing red-yellow-red bicolor his predecessors had adopted in 1785, but replaced the Bourbon crowned arms with his own Bonapartist eagle — a foreign dynasty's emblem grafted onto an otherwise unchanged Spanish flag, much like Napoleonic client states elsewhere in Europe.

Kingdom of Spain (Bourbon, unified)

Who & why: the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) ends with Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV, confirmed on the Spanish throne in exchange for renouncing any future claim to France. His victorious Nueva Planta decrees (Aragón and Valencia 1707, Mallorca 1715, Catalonia 1716) abolish the old separate kingdoms' own laws and institutions, administratively unifying Spain under Castilian law for the first time. The 18th century that follows brings Enlightenment reform under Charles III, but ends with the shock of the French Revolution next door.

What it represents: the white Cross of Burgundy continues as the army's flag into this period, but in 1785 Charles III adopts an entirely new red-yellow-red naval ensign, choosing it specifically for visibility at sea over the white Bourbon flags that were hard to distinguish at a distance — the same colors, in the same proportions, flown by Spain to this day.

Kingdom of Spain (Habsburg era)

Who & why: Charles I inherits Castile and Aragón in 1516 through his mother Joanna, and the Holy Roman Empire in 1519 through his father, becoming Emperor Charles V — ruler of the largest European realm since Charlemagne. Castile and Aragón remain formally separate crowns, each with its own laws and Cortes, sharing only the monarch, throughout the whole Habsburg period; from 1580 to 1640, Philip II and his successors also hold the Portuguese crown in the same kind of personal union — the Iberian Union, covered in full on the Iberia hub page.

What it represents: the Cross of Burgundy, a ragged red saltire on white inherited from Charles's Burgundian grandmother Mary, becomes the common military and naval flag flown across this vast, administratively fragmented empire — a Habsburg family emblem doing the unifying work that no single "Spanish" flag yet existed to do.

Catholic Monarchs' union (Castile & Aragón)

Who & why: Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón married in 1469; Isabella secured the Castilian throne in 1474, and Ferdinand inherited Aragón in 1479, the same year the Treaty of Alcáçovas settled Castile's succession dispute with Portugal. On 2 January 1492 their joint forces take Granada, completing the Reconquista and ending 781 years of Muslim rule in Iberia — the same year Columbus sails west under their patronage and the Alhambra Decree expels Spain's Jewish population.

What it represents: a strictly personal union, not a merger — Castile and Aragón each keep their own laws, currency, and institutions for centuries yet — but the practical birth of what the world starts calling "Spain," shown here as the two crowns' arms placed side by side rather than blended into one.

Crown of Castile

Who & why: Ferdinand III inherits León from his mother in 1230, permanently reuniting it with Castile after several earlier splits and reunions between the two thrones. His conquests come fast: Córdoba in 1236, Seville in 1248. Granada, founded in 1238 by Muhammad I ibn al-Ahmar as the last independent Muslim state on the peninsula, survives as Castile's own tribute-paying vassal for most of the next two and a half centuries — the story told in the map above — until its final conquest in 1492 under the Catholic Monarchs.

What it represents: the quartered castles (Castile) and lions (León) arms, permanently combined from 1230 onward, becoming one of the most recognizable heraldic devices in Europe and still part of Spain's coat of arms today.

Kingdom of Asturias – León

Who & why: a Visigothic nobleman, Pelayo, defeats an Umayyad force at the Battle of Covadonga around 722, in the mountains of Asturias — a small, defensible corner of the peninsula the 711 conquest never fully absorbed. Later chroniclers, and Spanish national myth ever since, treat this as the start of the Reconquista. Asturias's capital and identity shift south to León in the early 10th century, and the throne splits from and reunites with a newly independent Castile more than once over the following three centuries before the two are permanently combined in 1230 (see the next entry).

What it represents: no securely documented flag survives from this pre-heraldic early medieval period; the lion later associated with León appears in seals and on coinage well before it appears on any attested textile banner. Shown here honestly blank rather than invented.

Roman Hispania & the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo

Who & why: Rome's conquest of Iberia, fought to deny Carthage the peninsula's silver and soldiers during the Second Punic War, takes nearly two centuries to complete and leaves behind roads, aqueducts, cities, and Latin, the direct ancestor of Spanish. As Roman authority collapses in the west, the Germanic Visigoths, already settled in Iberia as a Roman-recognized power, fill the vacuum and unify the whole peninsula under one crown by the late 6th century, ruling from Toledo. That kingdom falls in turn to an Umayyad invasion in 711, ending nearly a millennium of Roman and Visigothic rule and opening the roughly seven centuries of Muslim-ruled Iberia (Al-Andalus) against which the Kingdom of Asturias, covered next, begins its resistance.

What it represents: no flag survives or is plausibly attested for Roman Hispania or the Visigothic kingdom in any modern sense; Roman legionary standards (vexilla, the eagle-topped aquila) and Visigothic royal regalia such as votive crowns are the era's surviving symbols, none of them a national banner. Shown here honestly blank rather than invented.

World context: this nearly millennium-long span opens with Hannibal's crossing of the Alps and Rome's rise from republic to empire (the Colosseum, 70–80 CE; Hadrian's Wall, 122 CE), runs through the height and fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and closes just as the Umayyad Caliphate's rapid conquests reach their furthest extent and Tang China and the Carolingian Franks are consolidating power at the other ends of Eurasia.