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Murcia Region (Spain)

Murcia Region Autonomous Community, Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia

2:3
by Antonio Gutiérrez, taken with permission from the S.E.V. website
Flag adopted 26th March 1979

See also:

Spain

Other sites:

Símbolos (Spanish text only) at the Murcia Region Official Website, including downloadable files

Description

The flag of the Región de Murcia is red with four yellow castles (2+2) in the canton, and seven yellow crowns (1+3+2+1) on the lower fly.

Filip Van Laenen and Jordi Pérez, 12 March 1998

The flag of Murcia Region is a banner-of-arms of the arms granted in the early 80's (different from those of Murcia province and city), and the red/crimson colour is probably derived from that of the Cartagena 1873 pendón (banner/flag) which itself is based on the traditional crimson background of Castilian flags.

Santiago Dotor, 4 January 1999

The 7 crowns stand for the seven kingdoms of the Crown of Castile, and the 4 castles are dedicated to Castile and stand for the different characters of the people of Murcia: Inner (Castilian), Mediterranean (Arabic or Bereber?), Eastern (Valencian) and Southern (Andalusian). The castles also remind of the fact that Murcia was frontier area during the Reconquest. The red was Cartagena shade of crimson, because it is the traditional color of the old kingdom of Murcia (though I have seen sometimes this flag with a dark purple field) and as a concession to the separatist area of Cartagena.

Jaume Ollé, 7 January 1999

Coat-of-Arms

With permission from the S.E.V. website	According to the Murcia Region Official Website

by Antonio Gutiérrez	by Santiago Dotor

The Murcia symbols webpage reported by Dov Gutterman contains legal texts about the flag and coat-of-arms of that Autonomous Community, plus images of both. Particularly interesting are the downloadable files, specially the Windows MetaFile vectorial image of the coat-of-arms. I used it to make a GIF showing certain differences with the one in the S.E.V. website by Antonio Gutiérrez. I am not sure which image is more correct. The first one shows the pearls and jewels on the crown as gold, the latter as white. Both appear strange — normally pearls are depicted as white and jewels as proper. By the way, the S.E.V. webpage contains much richer flag legislation.

Santiago Dotor, 1 December 2000

Former Flag of Murcia Province

The Diputación Provincial [provincial council] was an administrative body which dissappeared in the early 1980s in those Autonomous Communities which comprise only one province. Note that although the administrative body is now the Autonomous Community, the province still exists.

Antonio Gutiérrez, 18 November 1999

Murcia province had a dark blue (almost purple) flag with provincial coat-of-arms in center.

Jaume Ollé, 27 November 1999

History

Murcia didn't have a regional flag before General Franco's death (1975), but after that a plain white-red flag was used (with a shade of red called Cartagena which supposedly is a blend of the red in the Turkish flag and human blood), but rarely by the people. The military (at that time still very pro-Francoist) are key to the region's economy (San Javier Air Base, Cartagena Naval Base etc.) so people were afraid to fly regional flags which might be seen by the military as separatist. The plain red flag was based in the one of the Cartagena canton [during the 19th century First Spanish Republic], which included the provinces of Murcia and Albacete [now in Castile-La Mancha. Generally all the 1873 cantonal revolts flew a plain red flag but the Cartagena one reputedly has a special shade which later took the name of the city.

Nothing was decided by the pre-autonomic authorities about the flag and some proposals were made and sometimes even used, all with a field of red or dark purple. An encyclopaedia published the design of a dark purple flag with a large-sized, white-bordered provincial coat-of-arms in the middle (the edges of the white touching the upper and lower part of the flag), but crowns, castles, crescents and combinations of these were also used.

The design with four crowns in the canton, arranged in lozenge, was the most disseminated one, both with red and dark purple fields. When the regional government was forced to take a decision it accepted the proposals made on 10th October 1978 by Juan Torres Fontes and José Jover Zamora:

Blue flag with a golden castle in each corner. In the centre, 7 crowns (arranged 1,3,2,1)
Red flag with 4 golden castles in the canton and 7 crowns in fly (very similar to the current design except for minor details)

The first one was rejected because blue tended to be associated with the previous regime. The second one was adopted 26th March 1979. The exact design of the crowns and castles was modified by Law 4/83 of 1983 and the change was applied to the flag.

Jaume Ollé, 7 January 1999