Flag of Cape Verde
Cape Verde’s flag is blue, with a stripe of white, red and white below the middle and a ring of ten yellow five-pointed stars towards the pole. The ten stars stand for the country’s ten islands and the blue for the sea around them, as the University of Illinois’s International and Area Studies Library explains them; the constitution describes the design and gives it no meaning.
How to read it
Article 8 of the Constitution of Cape Verde makes the flag, the anthem and the coat of arms the symbols of the republic and describes the flag. It has five horizontal bands. The upper band is blue and half the flag; the lower band is blue and a quarter. Between them are three bands of one twelfth each, white, red and white. Ten yellow five-pointed stars, each with one point straight up, form a circle centred where the second quarter of the width from the pole meets the second quarter of the height from the bottom, and the lowest star is centred on the middle of the lower blue band. The flag was first raised in 1992.
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The flag Cape Verde replaced in 1992
Cape Verde’s first flag, from independence on 5 July 1975 until 1992, reflected the victory of the PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, when the country was still united with Guinea-Bissau. It had red, yellow and green bars, which the Illinois library’s account reads as the struggle for freedom, mineral wealth and the earth. When a second party, the Movement for Democracy (MpD), was admitted in 1990, a new flag was called for, and the present one was unfurled in 1992.
The ten stars and the ten islands
The stars stand for the islands, but not for where they are: the islands lie in something closer to a V on the map than a ring, the same account notes.
Read next
- Next in African flagsFlag of Côte d’IvoireCôte d’Ivoire’s flag is three vertical bands of equal width: orange, white and green. Presenting it in 1959, Minister of State Jean Delafosse gave orange as the colour of the country’s rich and generous land and the blood of a young people fighting for its emancipation, white as peace, “the peace of law”, and green as hope, for Ivorians the certainty of a better future.
- The same shape in Asian flagsFlag of AzerbaijanAzerbaijan’s flag has three horizontal stripes of equal width, blue, red and green from the top, with a white crescent and a white eight-pointed star in the middle of the red. The President’s office gives the meanings: blue for the Turkic origin of the Azerbaijani people, red for the wish to build a modern society and develop democracy, and green for belonging to Islamic civilisation.
More african flags
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with lines, squares and rectangles or stars.
Sources
- Cape Verde 1980 (rev. 1992) Constitution, Constitution of the Republic of Cape Verde, Article 8 (English translation), Constitute Project, Article 8
- What’s in a Flag? A Brief Introduction to Vexillology (Illinois IAS Library), International and Area Studies Library, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Glocal Notes blog, “What’s in a Flag? A Brief Introduction to Vexillology”, University of Illinois Library, blog post
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 13, 2026. How we research
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