Flags of portuguese colonies

Last modified: 2005-08-26 by antonio martins
Keywords: colonial | coat of arms: escutcheons | coat of arms: per mantel | armillary sphere |
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• Introduction
• Colonies’ flags proposal
• Colonies’ coats of arms, 1935
• Previous colonies’ coats of arms

• Flags of portuguese colonial officials
• Portuguese colonial companies
• Portuguese colonial municipal flags (~1954-1974)
• Colonies’ flags proposal
  • Portuguese Angola
  • Cape Verde: 1967 colonial flag proposal
  • East Timor - 1967 proposal
  • Portuguese Guinea (Guinea Bissau before 1974)
  • Portuguese India (Goa)
  • Macao - 1967 Colonial Flag Proposal
  • Mozambique - colonial flags
  • Sao Tome and Principe: 1967 Colonial Flag Proposal
• Marco Lino’s flag proposals for a “Portuguese Confederation”
• Portugal

Introduction

The portuguese government’s position regarding the colonies has been almost since the 40ies that those were as part of the country as Lisbon. Therefore it made no sense (in their minds) to officialize flags for those territories other than the portuguese national flag. Two caveats must be made, though:

• Despite not having distinctive flags for the colonies themselves, flags did exist for the officials in charge of the colonies and for military divisions. Some of these flags could have had some degree of distinctiveness and localness.
• Just as happened in the mainland Portugal, local authorities where allowed flags of their own. When those existed (not always, asfar as I know), they followed the very same rules of the portuguese municipal flags still valid today (in Portugal alone, as far as I know): gironnies or plain flags for cities, quartered or plain flags for towns.

Normal people would use the word "colony", even if the official name was "overseas province". In practice they didn’t work just any other province, note: A normal portuguese was free to change lodgings from one to other mainland province, but he would need a special document issued after an official case analysis if he’d want to settle on overseas territory. I’m not sure if this applied to tourism also, but it probably did.
António Martins, 30 Jan 2000

Colonies’ flags proposal

Almeida Langhans’ proposal (1965)

There was, however, a project to give the Portuguese colonies / overseas provinces distinctive flags, but these were never adopted. The pattern for these flags was: the Portugese flag with in the lower fly the shield of the coat of arms of each territory. These coats o