The flag of Portugal is the national flag of the Portuguese Republic. It is a rectangular bicolour with a field unevenly divided into green on the hoist, and red on the fly. On 30 June 1911, less than a year after the downfall of the constitutional monarchy, this design was officially adopted for the new national flag, after selection by a special commission whose members included Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, João Chagas and Abel Botelho.
The conjugation of the new field colours, especially the use of green, was not traditional in the Portuguese national flag's composition and represented a radical republican-inspired change that broke the bond with the former religious monarchical flag. Since a failed republican insurrection on 31 January 1891, red and green had been established as the colours of the Portuguese Republican Party and its associated movements, whose political prominence kept growing until it reached a culmination period following the Republican revolution of 5 October 1910. In the ensuing decades, these colours were popularly propagandized as representing the hope of the nation (green) and the blood (red) of those who died defending it, as a means to endow them with a more patriotic and dignified, therefore less political, sentiment.
|
