- Capital
- Riga
- Continent
- Europe
- Flag adopted
- 1918
- Proportions
- 1:2[1]
- Designer
- Not individually credited
Latvia
What the source says
Checked against the constituting documentLatvijas valsts karogs ir karmīnsarkans ar baltu horizontālu svītru. (2) Latvijas valsts karoga sarkanbaltsarkano svītru attiecība ir 2:1:2. (3) Latvijas valsts karoga platuma un garuma attiecība ir 1:2.
Checked means compared against the quoted text, not read by a person. What the marks mean.
Colors and meaning
Carmine red[1] #9E3039
Said by tradition to derive from a wounded warrior's blood-soaked, white-striped burial sheet in an old Latvian legend
White[1] #FFFFFF
The same legendary sheet
What the law specifies[1]
The flag law describes the flag as carmine red with a white horizontal stripe, sets the red-white-red bands in a 2:1:2 ratio, and fixes the flag's width to length at 1:2. The law does not assign the colours a meaning; it refers the exact shades out to separate regulations.
Symbolism and history
A dark carmine-red-white-red horizontal tricolor with an unusually narrow white band, a design documented as early as the 13th century and among the oldest flag traditions in Europe, restored at independence in 1918 and again in 1990.
Most similar flags
The 6 closest of the 194 other national flags, ranked by a similarity index computed from the flag images themselves. The number is that index, 0–100 — not a claim that the two flags are “X% identical”.
- Qatar69
near-identical colour proportions.
- Spain69
the same horizontal band layout; similar colours in a different arrangement.
- Thailand67
the same horizontal band layout; similar colours in a different arrangement.
- Austria53
the same horizontal band layout.
- Netherlands52
the same horizontal band layout.
- Croatia51
the same horizontal band layout.
From this entry, not from the index: Shares Austria's red-white-red band sequence, though Latvia's red is a much darker carmine shade and the white band is proportionally narrower.
Computed at build time: each flag is rasterised to 64x48, and the score is 0.55 × colour overlap + 0.45 × structure. A different weighting would rank these differently. How the index works.
Sources
[1] Verified against Latvijas valsts karoga likums, 2. pants (Saeima (Parliament of Latvia), via likumi.lv) on 2026-07-17. Backs which colors the flag has, the proportions and the description of the design on this page. The passage it was checked against is quoted at the top of this entry.
Further reading: Flag of Latvia on Wikipedia