Municipality of El Tanque (Tenerife Island, Santa Cruz de Tenerife Province, Canary Islands, Spain)

Ilustrísimo Ayuntamiento de El Tanque

Last modified: 2009-01-31 by eugene ipavec
Keywords: el tanque | tenerife | mountain (brown) | coat of arms | ears of grain; 5 (yellow) | well (white) | tree (proper) | crown |
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image by José Manuel Erbez, exported to GIF by Santiago Dotor, 27 Feb 2004

• Description
• Rejected Flag Proposal
• Coat of Arms

See also:

• Tenerife Island (Canary Islands, Spain)
• Canary Islands (Spain)
• Spain

Other sites:

• Flags of Tenerife by José Manuel Erbez

The only vexillological spotting during a week's holiday in Tenerife was the (probable) flag of El Tanque, a municipality in northwest Tenerife and one of only three landlocked. From the city hall hung four or five flags, all of them the typical set of Spanish, Canary Islands, Tenerife island and I seem to recall also an EU flag, except for a white flag with a coat-of-arms, which I assume is the local flag.

Santiago Dotor, 25 Feb 2004

El Tanque's flag is white with the coat of arms in its centre. I spotted this flag on 30 January in Military Museum Sta. Cruz d. T.

Sources and Credits

Klaus-Michael Schneider, 21 Apr 2007

At the town hall of El Tanque (Alto) there was no municipality flag but only the Spanish flag and the regional flags. So José Manuel Erbez might be right in that there is no flag used by the municipality, but there is a – probably unique – flag in the Military Museum of Sta. Cruz.

Klaus-Michael Schneider, 18 May 2008

According to Faustino Alegría, Mayor of El Tanque, the Municipal Council adopted in 1998 or 1999 a blue, green and brown flag, but the court rejected it. The same design was approved again by the Municipal Council in 2000 or 2001 but the relevant documentation was lost. Nothing has happened since then.

Source: El Día, 03 Aug 2008

Ivan Sache, 07 Aug 2008

The arms were adopted on 1st July 1988; see text of decree, which details its Spanish blazon as

Mantelado. 1º. en campo de oro, un pino de sinople; 2º. en campo de gules, un haz, de cinco espigas de trigo en oro; el mantel de azur con un monte de tres picos de sinople, perfilados de plata, por el que discurre un torrente hasta un estanque; al timbre, corona real cerrada.

Santiago Dotor, 25 Feb 2004

I'll take a whack at putting this into Anglo-Norman heraldese:

Tierced per mantel (i.e., the curved chevron-like line of division found on some other Spanish civic arms): 1st, or a pine tree vert; 2nd, gules a sheaf of five ears of wheat or; the mantel, azure a mount of three peaks vert fimbriated argent and issuing therefrom a stream running into a tank (estanque, canting on the name of the town?); for crest, a closed royal crown.

Joseph McMillan, 25 Feb 2004

Shield is divided by chevron, the chevron's lines are convexly curved. The chief is divided per pale. In the right part of chief is a tree, probably a pine in a golden (yellow) field. In its left part are five golden (yellow) connected ears of grain in a red field. In the base is a brown mountain with three peaks in front of a blue sky, standing on a green field with a white well in front. The shield is topped by a crown.

• The pine-tree symbolizes the forests on the municipality's hilltops.
• The number of the ears of grain is that one of the five settlements forming the municipality.
• The mountain symbolizes various volcanic eruptions, from which the municipality suffered in the past.
• The torrent symbolizes the riches of clear water and the well, collecting the waters from the local creeks like a water-tank, which gave the municipality its name ("tanque"). The well is still situated in the municipality's region of La Hoya.

Sources and Credits; Simbolos De Canarias website by José Manuel Erbez

Klaus-Michael Schneider, 21 Apr 2007 and 21 Mar 2008