How did the estelada arrive in Catalonia?

BarcelonaThe 'senyera' is the flag that represents the entire Catalan people, beyond political sensitivities: it is used by both pro-independence parties and those that are not, and it flies equally on balconies during the Diada as it does on the institutional buildings of the Generalitat. Formed by four red bars on a yellow background, the symbol draws from the coat of arms of the Counts of Barcelona and, later, from the Crown of Aragon, documented at least since the 12th century. Popular legend, however, attributes it to Wilfred the Hairy, who supposedly dipped his fingers in his own blood to mark a golden shield.

The 'senyera' obtained legal recognition as the flag of Catalonia in 1933, shortly after the proclamation of the 1932 Statute of Autonomy, during the Second Republic. Abolished during the Franco regime, it regained official status with the 1979 Statute, which came into force in 1980 and consolidated it as an institutional symbol of Catalan self-government. Since then, the 'senyera' is inseparable from the great symbolic dates of the Catalan calendar: it presides over the events of the September 11th Diada and intertwines with the rose and the book every Sant Jordi.

The Cuban mirror of Catalan independence

The trajectory of the 'estelada' is quite different, the flag that for many years has become the visual emblem of the independence movement and which, precisely for this reason, has been in the news again in recent weeks. During the league match between Barça and Elche, at the Martínez Valero stadium, National Police officers carried out a brutal assault on a minor that spread on social media. The episode received a nearly unanimous condemnation from the Catalan political spectrum, and the Ministry of the Interior has opened a file on the officers. Barça, for its part, came to the defense of the young member and claimed that displaying the 'estelada' in the stands is a legitimate act of exaltation of the symbol, not a provocation. In fact, the next Barça match at the Camp Nou became a massive display of this banner.

Unlike the 'senyera', the 'estelada' does not have medieval roots but is a creation of the 20th century, and its exact origin is less settled than is usually explained: historian Fermí Rubiralta, author of a biography on who is considered its promoter, Vicenç Albert Ballester, clarifies that there is already photographic evidence of the design in 1915, and the first preserved historical 'estelada' –at the Museum of History of Catalonia– belonged to a Catalan volunteer in the First World War. "Rather than being born, it became definitely popularized," summarizes Rubiralta. This popularization happened in 1918, when Ballester promoted the Pro-Catalonia Committee, an organization that sought the support of the League of Nations –the predecessor of the UN– for the self-determination of Catalonia, following the postulates of American President Woodrow Wilson.

The design was inspired by flags from other independence processes, especially the Cuban one. The connection is not only aesthetic, explains historian Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté: "There were Catalans who had fought with the Cuban rebel army" before bringing the symbology to Catalonia: Ballester himself worked for some years in Cuba. The blue triangle represents equality, and the five-pointed star, freedom, "as in other national liberation movements of the era," maintains Solé.

For decades, the estelada was a minority symbol in the whole of Catalan society, reserved for pro-independence circles and often displayed clandestinely during the Franco dictatorship. Its massive popularization, as Solé argues, is much more recent: 2010, when the Constitutional Court ruling that cut the Statute led a good part of the independence movement to abandon the path of the pact. "It is from there, from 2010, when, definitively, the estelada was taken as a very majority symbol," the historian assures. The 2012 Diada, with more than a million people on the streets, would be its first great mass expression.