Valencia CF badge



I have often wondered why the bat appears on the top of the Valencia badge and after we added the badge to the collection I thought that I had better find out.

The badge is based on the coat of Arms of Valencia:



The coat of arms of the city is in fact the coat of arms of James I of Aragon who conquered the Balearics and Valencia in the first part of the thirteenth century. But why did he have a bat in his coat of arms? Nobody really knows why, it could be that bats were and are simply common in the area, and this sounds like the most likely explanation. Less likely theories include that a bat landed on his flag when he was entering Valencia to take it back from the Moors in 1238 and he added it to his coat of arms then.

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