Flags with coats of arms and complex emblems

Most national flags are stripes and colours, copied in a minute. A handful instead carry a full coat of arms in the middle of the cloth, complete with animals, mountains, instruments or whole human figures. These are the flags that make any illustrator sweat, and in a quiz you spot them at once by the sheer amount of detail.

Spain and the motto beyond the strait

On a field of red and yellow, with the yellow middle band twice as tall, the Spanish coat of arms sits towards the hoist. It gathers the emblems of the old kingdoms such as Castile and León, along with the crown and the lilies of the House of Bourbon.

On either side stand the two Pillars of Hercules, marking the western end of the Mediterranean, wrapped in a ribbon bearing the motto Plus Ultra, Latin for further beyond. Even that small detail shows how much history can be packed into a single emblem.

Portugal and the navigators' sphere

Portugal's flag is green at the hoist and red towards the fly, and right on the boundary sits a yellow armillary sphere, an old navigation instrument from the age of long sea voyages. Over it lies the coat of arms itself: a white shield holding five small blue shields in a cross, each dotted with white, ringed by a red border with seven golden castles. Anyone drawing that freehand needs patience and a steady hand.

The armillary sphere points back to the age of long sea voyages, when Portuguese ships were charting new routes across the oceans. That is why it still sits at the centre of the flag and makes it instantly recognisable, even if you cannot decipher the details of the shield at first glance.

Mexico and the eagle on the cactus

Green, white and red in vertical bands, and in the white centre a golden eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus with a snake in its beak. The image goes back to an old founding legend: an eagle on a cactus was to mark the spot where the city of Tenochtitlan would rise, today's Mexico City.

The cactus, the eagle and the rocky island in the water are all part of that story. It leaves the Mexican flag practically unmistakable, since no other state carries exactly this scene in the middle.

Coats of arms packed with detail

Four flags where the emblem almost matters more than the background:

• Ecuador: the coat of arms shows Mount Chimborazo with a river, a steamship upon it, a sun with zodiac signs above and, at the very top, a condor with spread wings.
• Belize: the only national flag with clearly recognisable people, two woodcutters beside a mahogany tree, the whole thing in up to twelve colours.
• Turkmenistan: widely seen as the most detailed flag of all, with a vertical stripe of five intricate carpet patterns, plus a crescent, stars and olive branches.

Why this helps in a quiz

A full coat of arms is hard to paint but easy to recognise. Where a plain tricolour can be confused with many others, an eagle with a snake or an armillary sphere is practically unique.

That is exactly why these flags are often the safe points in a quiz: you do not need to redraw the details, you only need to match the emblem to a nation. The real trouble starts with all the similar tricolours that carry no emblem at all, where only the order of the colours decides.

In CountryRush you can train both, the busy coat of arms and the plain tricolour, until you catch each at a glance. The Daily Trip builds a fresh mix every day, so it is not always the easy cases that come up.