Flag of Honduras

How to read it

The flag was created by Legislative Decree No. 7 of 16 February 1866 and given its present wording by Decree 29 of 18 January 1949, at the start of Juan Manuel Gálvez’s government. The 1949 text, as Honduras’s Tribunal Superior de Cuentas quotes it, describes three equal horizontal stripes, the top and bottom turquoise blue (azul turquesa) and the centre white, with five five-pointed stars of the same blue: four forming a rectangle parallel to the stripes and the fifth in its centre. The flag is twice as long as it is high. 1 September is Flag Day, under Decree 84-95.

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Turquoise or navy blue

The decree says turquoise but gives no colour code, and for decades flags were made in many blues. In 2014 El Heraldo found flags in cobalt, navy, sapphire and Klein blue, and the culture minister, Tulio Mariano González, admitted an unhealthy tolerance of other shades, even by the state. Navy blue came in through the military, El Heraldo wrote in 2026, and settled in under the dictatorship of Tiburcio Carías Andino (1933 to 1949). In 2022 the government of Xiomara Castro decreed the use of turquoise. In January 2026, as Nasry Asfura’s government came in, the National Congress went back to navy blue in its own logo, and El Heraldo reported that the new legislature would open with the flag in the earlier shade. In September 2026 the deputy José Jaar proposed amending the decree to make azul turquí the legal colour, leaving the stripes, the stars and the proportions as they are.

Honduran writers differ on how far back turquoise goes. El Heraldo, in 2026, says the colour was first set by the 1866 decree. Tu Nota, in 2023, says the 1866 decree said only blue and the 1949 decree named the shade, and El Heraldo’s own report of January 2022 says the same of 1866.

The five stars

The five stars sit in the centre of the white stripe, four in a rectangle and one in the middle, in the same blue as the stripes. The Honduran news site Tu Nota explains them as the five countries of the old Central American federation, and the flag as based on the flag of the United Provinces of Central America. The flag law itself gives no meaning.

Telling it from El Salvador’s and Nicaragua’s flags

All three have blue-white-blue horizontal stripes, from the flag of the Central American federation. Honduras’s has five blue stars and no coat of arms. El Salvador’s carries a triangular coat of arms (or, on office flags, the motto DIOS UNION LIBERTAD), and Nicaragua’s a triangle of five volcanoes in a ring of lettering. Guatemala’s blue and white stripes run up and down instead.