cebu city

Fuente Osmeña

Posted on September 29, 2008

Built in honor of Cebu’s “Grand Old Man”, Sergio Osmeña–the fourth president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines– and to commemorate the city’s first waterworks system, Fuente Osmeña is a fountain rotunda where major thoroughfares converge: Gen. Maxilom Avenue (aka Mango Avenue), Osmeña Boulevard (aka Jones Avenue, towards downtown) and B. Rodriguez Street. The oval was built in 1912. Since the 1980s, this was where anti-Marcos and other political demonstrations were held. Before malls became popular in the mid-1990s, manyRead More→

Pari-an of Cebu

Posted on April 15, 2008

When I was younger, I remember accompanying my mother to downtown Cebu to shop for cloth and other supplies for our small tailoring family business. At the heart of this locality is the pari-an, a term used to denote the old Chinese district in established Philippine cities. Pari-an and Colon Street–the oldest in the Philippines–used to be the center of cultural, business and social activity in the country’s first Spanish settlement. Named after Cristobal Colon or Christopher Columbus, Colon StreetRead More→

Sinulog Festival

Posted on March 27, 2008

Ever since I was a kid, an occasion I look forward to every year, even more than I do Christmas or New Year, is the Sinulog Festival in Cebu City. The nine-day celebration, in honor of the Holy Child Jesus, culminates every third Sunday of January with a Grand Parade that meanders through the festooned city streets, with elaborately dressed dancers, magnificent floats and colorful ‘higantes’ (papiér-mache giants), all moving to the infectious rhythms of tribal dance and heralding “VivaRead More→

Basilica Minore del Santo Niño & Magellan’s Cross

Posted on March 2, 2008

A place I truly call home is where I was born and raised, Cebu City: the oldest and most visited city in the Philippines. Crowned the Queen City of the South, Cebu is a dynamic metropolis, looking forward to the future as one of Asia’s prime commercial hubs, and always in touch with a past brimming with so much history. In 1521, Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan–the man who headed the first expedition that circumnavigated the Earth–first landed on the islandRead More→