The Canary Islands flag is three vertical bands — white, blue and yellow — and it is not an ancient banner at all: it was adopted in 1982, when the islands became an autonomous community of Spain, and its colours were chosen as a diplomatic compromise between the two provinces that had spent a century refusing to agree on anything.

White and blue were the colours of the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Blue and yellow were the colours of the province of Las Palmas. Put them side by side, share the blue between them, and nobody has to concede first. You will see the result on every public building, every number plate and a good proportion of the balconies in the islands.

Alongside it you will see a second flag, similar but with seven green stars on it, which is not official and means something considerably more pointed. And you will see a coat of arms featuring two large dogs, which brings up the best piece of etymology in the archipelago.

The coat of arms: seven islands, two dogs and an ocean

The Canarian shield is blue, charged with seven silver islands arranged in their actual geographical positions above stylised waves — so the shield is, in effect, a map. Above it sits a royal crown. On either side, holding it up, stands a dog. Below runs a scroll with a single word: OCÉANO.

The seven islands are the seven that have historically counted as islands with their own governments, which is why La Graciosa — inhabited, with its own port and its own beaches — is not among them. It was formally recognised as the eighth island by the Spanish senate in 2018, but the shield had been drawn a long time before, and nobody is re-engraving public buildings.

Named after dogs, not birds

Here is the detail almost every visitor gets backwards. The islands are not named after canaries. The canary is named after the islands.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, drawing on the account of an expedition sent by King Juba II of Mauretania around the turn of the first century, records that one of the islands was called Canaria on account of the multitude of large dogs found there — canes, in Latin — two of which were supposedly taken back to the king. The name attached to the island, then to the group, and when European traders later encountered a small streaky green finch living there, they called it the canary bird after its home. The yellow cage bird came much later, through centuries of selective breeding; the wild original is a modest, subtly-marked thing you can hear singing in any pine wood on the islands, as anyone who has tried birdwatching here will confirm.

The dogs on the shield are usually taken to be Presa Canario, the heavy island mastiff. There is a respectable competing theory, incidentally, that the name comes from the Canarii, a Berber people of the Atlas region, and that Pliny's dogs are a Roman folk etymology. Both stories are taught locally; the dog version is the one on the coat of arms, so the dog version wins.

Which makes the full chain: a North African people or a pack of large dogs, to a Latin island name, to a small green finch, to a yellow pet bird, to a shade of yellow, to the football team nickname of Norwich City. Nothing else in European geography travels quite that far.

The seven-star flag

The other flag you will see — white, blue and yellow with seven green stars, usually arranged in the shape of the archipelago inside a white triangle — belongs to the Canarian independence movement. It dates from the 1960s and is associated with the nationalist organisation founded by Antonio Cubillo, which campaigned for separation from Spain from exile in Algeria.

It has no official status. It is entirely legal to fly, and you will see it on balconies, at demonstrations, on stickers and on football terraces, and painted on walls in villages that would surprise you. What it signals ranges from hard independentism to a general assertion of Canarian identity against Madrid, and the distinction matters — most people flying it are not separatists, which is the subject of our page on Canarian identity and the nationalist movement. The safest position for a visitor is to notice it and not have an opinion about it out loud.

Each island has its own flag too

Every island council flies its own flag and arms, most of them built from the same blue, white and yellow palette with the island's shield in the middle, and many of them carrying the symbols of the patron virgin of the island.

The one that stops British visitors dead is Tenerife's: a white diagonal cross on a blue field. It is, to the naked eye, the flag of Scotland. Both come from the saltire of Saint Andrew — Tenerife's conquest and its capital's foundation are tied to his feast day — and the resemblance is a coincidence of shared iconography rather than any connection. It does mean that a Scottish fan in a Tenerife bar occasionally finds the locals have got there first.

The natural symbols: a plant and an animal each

In 1991 the Canarian parliament did something rather charming and gave the archipelago and each island an official natural symbol — one plant and one animal apiece. For the islands as a whole it chose the Canary date palm and the wild canary.

Island by island the choices are a decent short course in what makes each one distinctive. Tenerife took the dragon tree and the blue chaffinch, the slate-coloured finch that lives only in high Canary pine forest. Gran Canaria took the cardón, the great candelabra spurge, and the Presa Canario dog. El Hierro took the juniper and its giant lizard, which was on the brink of extinction at the time and remains the most powerful symbol on the list. La Gomera took the laurel forest tree viñátigo and the rabiche pigeon; La Palma the Canary pine; Fuerteventura the houbara bustard, the desert bird that stalks the island's plains.

And Lanzarote chose the strangest of all: the jameito, a tiny blind albino crab that lives in the lightless saltwater lake inside a collapsed lava tube. You can lean over the rail at Jameos del Agua and look at them — white specks on black rock, found in that cave system and effectively nowhere else on Earth. An island whose official animal is a blind cave crab is an island that knows exactly what it has.

The anthem, and the day

The Canarian anthem was adopted in 2003 and is built on the Arrorró, a traditional island lullaby, arranged into a symphonic theme by the Tenerife composer Teobaldo Power in the nineteenth century. It is unusual among regional anthems for being gentle rather than martial, and it is the sort of thing that gets sung rather than played — a starting point if you want to explore Canarian music and folklore.

The Día de Canarias falls on 30 May, marking the first session of the Canarian parliament in 1983. It is a full public holiday across the islands, with folk music, school celebrations, wrestling, traditional dress and a great deal of gofio and cheese; some shops and offices close, so it is worth knowing about when planning around island holidays. Each island and most towns also have their own feast day on top of that.

Symbols you will see and not recognise

The bottom line

The official symbols of the Canary Islands are younger than most visitors assume — a 1982 flag, a 1991 list of plants and animals, a 2003 anthem — because the islands only became a self-governing region in the 1980s and had to invent the furniture of one quickly. What is genuinely old is underneath: a Roman name derived from dogs, a Berber substrate, a patron virgin from the fifteenth century and a set of endemic species found nowhere else.

Learn the flag, learn that the bird came second, and the rest of the archipelago's odder facts will start to make a lot more sense.