Lanzarote is among several places rolling out a system that adds a distinct shape to each lifeguard flag, so a swimmer who is colour blind can tell at a glance whether the sea is safe, without having to judge red from green. The flags are already flying on several of the island's beaches.
The system is called ColorADD, and it works by giving every colour its own symbol, printed in the centre of the flag. The colour stays as it is for everyone who can read it, but the added shape means the same warning now reaches people who previously had to guess or ask.
Colour blindness is far more common than many people think. It affects around one man in every twelve and one woman in every two hundred, which adds up to roughly 350 million people worldwide. For all of them, a safety system that depends on separating red, yellow and green is close to useless, which is the gap these symbols are designed to close.
Each flag now pairs a colour with a symbol. Green, for safe swimming, shows a diagonal bar next to a triangle pointing right. Yellow, for caution, shows the diagonal bar by itself. Red, for no swimming, shows a triangle pointing left. The black flag, flown for pollution or serious management problems, is left as a plain black square, as there is no colour there to be confused with anything else.
Learning the three main shapes before you head down to the sand takes a few seconds and means you can read any flag on any beach that uses the system, wherever you are.
Several of the island's busiest beaches have the new flags flying, among them Puerto del Carmen's Playa Grande and Los Pocillos, along with Matagorda and El Reducto in the capital, Arrecife. More are expected to adopt them.
The rollout comes at a time of real concern about drownings. Spain recorded 472 last year, of which 75 were on Canary Islands beaches, leaving the archipelago the second worst region in the country. The toll has continued into 2026, with 217 drownings nationwide by early July and 30 of those in the Canaries. A flag that more people can read correctly is a small but genuine step against those numbers.
