Introduction
New Caledonia flies two flags. One is the French tricolour; the other is the Kanaky flag shown here, a horizontal triband of blue, red and green charged with a yellow disc bearing a black flèche faîtière.
Most communes now fly both. Some fly only the French flag. There is no single flag that stands for the territory on its own.
Meaning & Symbolism
The blue is the sky and the sea, the red is the blood of the Kanak people and their struggle, the green is the land. The yellow disc is the sun.
The black figure on it is the flèche faîtière, the carved spire that crowns a Kanak great hut, an object of real ceremonial weight rather than an invented emblem.
History of the New Caledonia Flag
The flag was adopted in 1980 by the FLNKS, the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front, a party favouring independence.
The Nouméa Accord of 1998, signed by the French government and both pro and anti independence parties, opened the way for a flag of the territory. Until 2010 the French flag was the only official one; since then the two have flown together, and the question of a single common flag has never been settled.
Curiosities
- New Caledonia has no single official flag: the French tricolour and the Kanaky flag fly together.
- Not every commune flies both. Some fly only the French flag, and the choice is political.
- The black emblem is a flèche faîtière, the carved spire from the roof of a Kanak great hut.
- The Kanaky flag began in 1980 as the flag of an independence movement, not of an administration.
- The dual arrangement dates from 2010 and came out of the 1998 Nouméa Accord.
Download Flag
Download the flag of New Caledonia in high-quality SVG vector format or PNG raster images. SVG files can be scaled to any size without losing quality.
Digital icon artwork; its proportions may differ from the official flag proportions listed on this page.