Last modified: 2024-10-26 by 
klaus-michael schneider
Keywords: murca(freguesia) | base(wavy) | bridge | sculpture |
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![[Murça communal flag]](../images/p/pt-murmu.gif)
2:3, image by António Martins-Tuválkin and Sérgio Horta, 28 Jan 2024
It was a typical Portuguese communal flag, with the coat of arms centred on a plain black field, perhaps the only Portuguese communal flag having this colour, reported by Jens Pattke on 19 December 2015.
Jens Pattke is quoted to say that this flag has the "coat of arms centred on a plain black field, perhaps the only Portuguese communal flag having this colour". While it is not the only one (at least two others exist), it was the first. While the legal framework for these flags, in place since the early 1930s, does not preclude plain black flag backgrounds, and while two-colour backgrounds very often include black, only in 2001, with Murça commune, a plain black flag background was first introduced.
The relevant legal text is characteristically cryptic about flag backgrounds though, see here. No specific colours or colour combinations are prohibited, and only indirect inference from other parts of the law allows the traditional interpretation that
metal with colour should be used, not the other way around, in spite of many exceptions. Even the fact that the seven heraldic tinctures are to be used, instead of specific shades as such, has to to be indirectly inferred. By the same token, though, flags with ermine or veir backgrounds could be argueably accepted as legal.
Source: Sérgio Horta´s webpage
Klaus-Michael Schneider, 6 Jan 2016 and António Martins-Tuválkin, 28 Jan 2024
![[Murça communal flag 2001 - 2023]](../images/p/pt-murm3.gif)
image by António Martins-Tuválkin and Sérgio Horta, 28 Jan 2024
It was a typical Portuguese communal flag, with the coat of arms centred on a plain black field, perhaps the only Portuguese communal flag having this colour, reported by Jens Pattke on 19 December 2015.
Source: Sérgio Horta´s webpage
Klaus-Michael Schneider, 6 Jan 2016
![[Murça commune CoA]](../images/p/pt-murm).gif)
image by Sérgio Horta, 6 Jan 2016
Shield Or with base wavy of Azure and Argent, issuant from base a bridge Sable masoned Argent having one arch, in chief a Neolithic monument Gules, Mural crown Argent with four visible towers (town rank) and white scroll with inscription in black initials "FREGUESIA DE MURÇA".
Meaning:
The Neolithic monument, the so called "sow of Murça", also appears in the arms of Murça municipality.
The communal coat of arms of Murça, as created in 2001, uses a mural crown with three visible towers which, in 21st century CHAAP usage, is attributed to almost all communes, regardless of the honorific rank of the nominal settlement. However the relevant law prescribes, in here in §2 of
its 13th article that when a commune "is headed" by a town, which is the case of Murça, the mural crown should have instead four visible towers, "being the first and the fourth smaller than the other two". (It was to avoid the graphic and artistic hassle of this size difference that the current practice was established against the legal prescription — as is the case of a host of other similar ill-advised details of this law, see here, which are ignored by the CHAAP).
Source: Hiperglobal webpage
Klaus-Michael Schneider, 6 Jan 2016
The symbols were published in Diário da República: II Série on 18 April 2023, see here. The former symbols were published in Diário da República: III Série on 4 June 2001.
Klaus-Michael Schneider, 6 Jan 2016
Murça s one of the seven communes of Murça Municipality; it had 2136 inhabitants in 2011 and covers 14,6 km².
Klaus-Michael Schneider, 6 Jan 2016
back to Murça Communes click here