Belmonte Municipality (Portugal)

Concelho de Belmonte, Distrito de Castelo Branco

Last modified: 2014-11-15 by klaus-michael schneider
Keywords: belmonte | tower(silver) | hill |
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• About the Flag
• Version without Coat of Arms
• Presentation of Belmonte

• Belmonte Communes
• Portugal

• Page about Belmonte at the Portuguese Municipalities’s Association website (incl. image of the arms)
  reported by António Martins, 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 green and white.

Jorge Candeias, 24 July 1999

Shield Gules, in base a hill Vert, crowned by a two level castle tower Argent with port and windows Gules. Mural crown Argent with four visible towers (town rank) and white scroll reading in black upper case letters "VILA DE BELMONTE". This should be one of the “purest” coats of arms in Portuguese civic heraldry, which unfortunately is often too “busy”.
Meaning:
The name "Belmonte" means "Fair hill" ("fair" in the sense of "beautiful"), so that is the hill on the coat of arms. The tower stands for the medieval castle of Belmonte, part of the 2nd defensive line of the border.
António Martins-Tuválkin and Jorge Candeias, 21 Oct 1998

Flag and arms approved by Comissão de Heráldica da Associação dos Arqueólogos Portugueses (CHAAP) on 22 December 1922
Sérgio Horta, 21 Oct 1998

Version without Coat of Arms

Plain (monocoloured) Portuguese subnational flags are not allowed to have variations without arms: plain flags always carry the coat of arms.
Jorge Candeias, 18 July 1999

Presentation of Belmonte

Belmonte is a town located in inner Portugal in a mountainous area, (which can be guessed by it’s name: the contraction of the words "belo" and "monte", meaning "beautiful" and "hill", respectively) in the north of the Castelo Branco District (old province of Beira Baixa and future region of Beira Interior). The municipality is small (114,6 sq. km), scarsely populated (less than 7420 inhabitants in 5 communes, as of 1990) and poor, being it’s major economical resources the agriculture, as far as I know.
Jorge Candeias, 21 Oct 1998

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