The country that once governed a quarter of the planet does not have a national day. The 6.7 square kilometre territory attached to the bottom of Spain, which is also British, has one of the loudest in the world. That contrast is the most interesting thing about national days, and it is worth understanding before you decide where to spend one. Almost all of them. There are 193 member states of the United Nations, and the standard reference lists track around **225 nations and territories** with a national day, since the count includes places like Gibraltar that are not sovereign states in their own right. Of those, roughly **163 mark independence** in one form or another. That is the overwhelming pattern worldwide. A country was ruled by somebody else, it stopped being ruled by somebody else, and the anniversary of that moment became the date everyone gets the day off. The remainder commemorate something else: a constitution, a unification, a revolution, a monarch's birthday, or a patron saint. The **United Kingdom** has no official national day. It celebrated Empire Day on 24 May for the first half of the twentieth century, but attitudes to the empire changed and it was dropped in 1958. Nothing replaced it. There are four patron saints' days across the four nations, and none of them is a UK wide public holiday. **Denmark** is the other. It has Constitution Day on 5 June, Liberation Day on 5 May and Valdemars Day on 15 June, and none of the three carries official national day status. The usual explanation is that Denmark has existed for more than a thousand years without a period of foreign rule to be liberated from, so there was never an obvious date to anchor to. Both exceptions come down to the same thing. National days are usually born from a rupture, and neither country had one. |Type|What it marks|Examples| |Independence|The end of foreign rule|United States 4 July, India 15 August, Brazil 7 September| |Constitution|The adoption of a founding document|Norway 17 May, Denmark 5 June, Poland 3 May| |Revolution|The overthrow of a previous order|France 14 July, Portugal 25 April| |Unification|Separate parts becoming one|Germany 3 October, Italy 17 March| |Monarchy|A sovereign's birthday or accession|Netherlands 27 April, Thailand 28 July| |Self determination|A choice made by the population|Gibraltar 10 September| That last row is the rare one. Nearly every national day on earth celebrates a break. Gibraltar's celebrates a decision not to. On **10 September 1967**, Gibraltarians voted on whether to pass under Spanish sovereignty or remain British with self government. Turnout was **95.8 per cent**. The result was **12,138 votes to 44**, which is 99.6 per cent, and it is one of the most lopsided results ever recorded in a free vote anywhere. National Day itself is younger than the referendum. It was **first held on 10 September 1992**, organised by the Self Determination for Gibraltar Group in John Mackintosh Square to mark the referendum's twenty fifth anniversary. It has run every year since. So Gibraltar is in a very small group. It is a national day for a place that is not a country, marking a vote to remain part of another country, in a territory whose parent state has no national day at all. There is not much else like it. > Most of the world celebrates the day it left. Gibraltar celebrates the day it stayed. **San Marino** claims the oldest, 3 September, which by tradition marks the founding of the republic in the year 301. The date rests on tradition rather than documentation, but no other state makes a serious claim to anything earlier. **South Sudan** has the newest of the sovereign states, 9 July, marking independence from Sudan in 2011. Between those two sit seventeen centuries of ruptures, and the distribution is not even. A very large share of the world's national days fall between the 1940s and the 1970s, because that is when European empires came apart. If you plotted every independence day on a timeline you would be looking at a map of decolonisation. Gibraltar's neighbour offers the strangest contrast of all, and it happens one day later. **Catalonia's Diada is 11 September**, and it commemorates the fall of Barcelona in 1714 at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. It marks the day Catalonia lost. That is close to unique among the national days of the world, and it is a reminder that these dates are chosen for what a population wants to say about itself rather than for whether the day went well. Which puts three very different statements within twenty four hours of each other on the same stretch of coast. On 10 September Gibraltar celebrates choosing to stay British. On 11 September Catalonia commemorates a defeat that fuels an independence movement. And Spain's own national day, 12 October, marks the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. That Spanish date is itself argued over. **12 October** is the Fiesta Nacional, and marking a colonial arrival sits badly with a good number of pe