Wiphala
A square flag of 49 small squares in seven colours, set in diagonals. It is a symbol of the Aymara, Quechua and other Andean peoples and, since 2009, one of Bolivia’s official state symbols. How old it is, and where it came from, is disputed.
Meaning
Bolivia’s constitution of 2009 lists the wiphala among the symbols of the state, beside the red, yellow and green flag, the anthem, the arms, the cockade and the kantuta and patujú flowers. Felipe Ríos del Granado, reviewing a study of the flag in the Revista de Historia of La Paz’s Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, writes that since the 1980s it has been a symbol of the Indigenous peoples of the Andes, chiefly Aymara and Quechua, and of social movements. The Aymara researcher Germán Choquehuanca standardised it: seven colours (red, orange, green, yellow, purple, blue and white) in 49 squares running in diagonals, seven by seven. The flag has stirred argument, above all in Bolivian politics, he notes, because it has been tied to the former president Evo Morales and his party.
Origin and history
Where the wiphala began is not settled. Correo del Sur, in a 2021 fact-check, sets out two accounts. One looks to Tiwanaku: the Bolivian archaeologist Jedú Sagárnaga and a Finnish colleague found about a hundred pieces of pottery from about AD 900 to 1050, some with a pattern very like the wiphala, which the political scientist Franco Limber reads as early uses of the flag. The other looks to the colonial period, to the paintings of angels with arquebuses made at Calamarca around 1684 by José López de los Ríos, in which the angels carry flags very like the wiphala.
A flag of the Incas?
Historians disagree. Limber treats the Tiwanaku pottery as evidence that the wiphala is pre-Columbian; the historian Roberto Fernández, quoted by Correo del Sur, answers that a pattern on a pot or a cloth is not a flag, which needs a bearer to carry it. Ríos del Granado writes that there is no evidence of flags in the Andes before the Spanish, though the checkerboard pattern on Inca tunics is taken as a sign of the wiphala’s ancestral roots, and that the colonial evidence is clearer. The anthropologist Vincent Nicolas, whose 2020 book he reviews, traces the flags carried at the feast of the Virgen del Rosario in Betanzos, Potosí, and other village festivals to colonial practice: their designs, he argues, copy the royal standards the conquistadors brought, and calls them “the wiphalas of the King”. Correo del Sur concludes that no clearly defined origin has been found.
Where you’ll see it today
whatdoesthissymbolmean.comFlag of BoliviaBolivia’s flag is red, yellow and green in three equal horizontal stripes, red at the top. Bolivia’s decree on the symbols of the State says the red is the blood shed by the heroes for the birth and preservation of the republic and the consolidation of the Plurinational State, the yellow the mineral and subsoil wealth of the Bolivian people, and the green the richness of nature and hope.Read next
- Next in Andean and Inca symbolsNazca linesGiant drawings scraped into the desert of southern Peru between about 500 BC and AD 500: straight lines and trapezoids several kilometres long, and outlines of animals and plants. UNESCO lists them as the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa.
- The same shape in Catholic symbolsBaptismal fontThe basin that holds the water of baptism, standing in a Catholic church or in a baptistery beside it.
See also
Gateway of the Sun (the Staff God), Nazca hummingbird, Nazca monkey, Nazca spider, Tumi (ceremonial knife), Inti (the Inca sun).
Sources
- Constitución Política del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia (2009), Constitution of Bolivia, 2009, article 6 (Spanish text, Constitute Project), Constitute Project, Artículo 6, II
- La wiphala y las disputas sobre su origen, Correo del Sur (Sucre), Panorama, 3 October 2021 (Bolivia Verifica), Correo del Sur, article text
- Review of Vincent Nicolas, Banderas de lucha, banderas de culto: las wiphalas del Rey (2020), by Felipe I. Ríos del Granado, Revista de Historia, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (La Paz), pp. 136–138, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, review text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from lines or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
Added .