Barrancos Municipality (Portugal)

Concelho de Barrancos, Distrito de Beja

Last modified: 2015-04-18 by klaus-michael schneider
Keywords: barrancos | cork oak | boar | fess(wavy) |
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• About the Flag
• Version without Coat of Arms
• Presentation of Barrancos
• Barrancos Commune

• Portugal

• Page about Barrancos at the Portuguese Municipalities’s Association website (incl. image of the arms)
  reported by António Martins-Tuválkin, 18 Nov 2001

About the Flag

It is a fairly typical Portuguese municipal flag, with the coat of arms centred on a field quartered of yellow and blue.

António Martins-Tuválkin,

The coat of arms is parted per fess: above its silver with a cork oak proper with yellow acorns, below its red with three wavy bars in silver-blue-silver in the lower part and a wild boar proper above it. The coat of arms is completed with a 4-towered mural crown (town rank) and a white scroll reading "VILA DE BARRANCOS".
Meaning:
This coat of arms illustrates the characteristics of the region. The cork oak stands for the riches of the region (produces mostly cattle and cork), the wavy stripes stand for the Múrtiga Creek or the Ardila River, the two waterways that cross the municipality (the last one defines the border with Spain for some kilometres). The yel field below probably also has a meaning related with cereals.
The boar stands for the famous Pata Negra ham, the most famous byproduct of the Alentejan black pig! Even more than cork, this is the main export of this municipality!
Jorge Candeias and António Martins-Tuválkin, 24/25 Jan 1999

Version without Coat of Arms

Presentation of Barrancos

Barrancos is a town placed very close to spain in the right bench of Guadiana River. They have their own dialect there, barranquenho, a mixture of Portuguese and Castilian, and some local idiossincrasies, to the point of saying from time to time that they are neither Portuguese nor Spanish. The municipality belongs to the District of Beja, old province of Baixo Alentejo. It is a small municipality with 168.4 km² and a little more than 1900 inhabitants, only has one commune, and is also a quite poor and rural region.
Jorge Candeias, 24 Jan 1999

According to linguists I’ve read, this is a «portuguese-castillian contact pidgin» (the order matters, as it is essentially portuguese).
António Martins-Tuválkin, 10 Feb 2003

Barrancos Commune

It is a fairly typical portuguese communal flag, with the coat of arms centred on plain red background.

The arms are Or a castle Gules closed of the Same, in base a boar Sable, in chief two branches of cork oak Vert leaved of the Same. Mural crown Argent with three visible towers (commune rank) and white scroll reading in black upper case letters "FREGUESIA DE BARRANCOS".

Flag and arms adopted and published in the official journal Diário da República: III Série in 1997.10.30.

Barrancos Commune is the only one in Barrancos municipality, and it shares its geographic and demographic data (q.v.).
António Martins, 24 Nov 2007

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