Vigan Summons Philippines Memories
'...He could imagine Vigan again, Ciudad Fernandina regal city of the north, the repository of wealth as only Ilokano industry and commerce could amass it; Vigan, anointed domain of power and learning, of grace and beauty and all the plenitude of blessings that are bestowed on those who commanded in the name of God and of the Spanish realm.'
By ANDREW SYMON
So writes Filipino novelist, Frank Sionil Jose, about Vigan, founded by the Spanish in 1575 and the third oldest town in the Philippines. Today, a sense of that earlier age described by Jose in his novel, Dusk, still lingers in Vigan. The town, on the west coast of Luzon, a day's drive north of Manila, is the only place in the Philippines where architecture and planning of earlier centuries have not been destroyed either by World War II, or the more recent onslaught of concrete, bitumen, and motor vehicles, or a combination of the two.Forgotten and languishing for much of the twentieth century, in contrast to its prominence in Spanish colonial times, Vigan is now finding that its years of stagnation have left it with an architectural wealth that no other town or city in the Philippines can match and the chance for new prosperity through tourism. Vigan is, says the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), 'the best-preserved example of a planned Spanish colonial town in Asia.'
Vigan's distinctive character and the importance of preserving it from neglect and pressures of modernization, are now internationally recognized. In December 1999, Vigan was made a Unesco World Heritage Site, joining the famous sites in Southeast Asia such as the Borubudur stupa in Java, the old cities of Angkor in Cambodia and Sukhothai in Thailand, and the former seat of Vietnamese emperors in Hue.
Elsewhere in the Philippines, there are architectural legacies of the Spanish period, but not complete towns as in the case of Vigan. While Manila, the capital, does retain the thick walls and fortresses surrounding the old city, 'Intramuros,' within its walls, almost all of the original buildings were levelled in fighting between the Japanese and Americans in 1945. One of the few unharmed is the San Augustine Church, begun in 1599, added to and rebuilt over the centuries, and also a Unesco World Heritage Site. Efforts are being made to re-create the past within Intramuros and replicas of old buildings have been constructed. But only in Vigan is there an entire urban precinct of eighteenth and nineteenth and early twentieth century buildings.
Vigan (and San Augustine Church) differ from the other Unesco sites in that they are an expression of European influence on the history of Southeast Asia. In contrast, the other places are testimonies to the indigenous cultures of Asia, although not simply of one people as each culture in Southeast Asia has been influenced by others, particularly by China from the north and India from the west. Vigan, Unesco says, represents a wider fusion of influences: 'Its architecture reflects the coming together of cultural elements from elsewhere in the Philippines and from China with those of Europe to create a unique culture and townscape without parallel anywhere in East and Southeast Asia.'
Stamp of Spain
Vigan lies four hundred kilometres north of Manila on a narrow plain along the west coast of island of Luzon, hemmed in by the sharply rising wall of the Cordillera ranges. Situated on a large delta island created by the Abra River flowing down from the mountains to the sea, it was here, more than four hundred years ago, that Spanish conquistador, Juan de Salcedo, grandson of the first Spanish governor of the Philippines, Miguel de Legazpi, and a handful of followers declared Luzon's northern lands a province of the Spanish Crown and Papal Cross. This was just a few years after the founding of Cebu and Manila, and seventy years after navigator, Ferdinand Magellan, claimed the Philippines archipelago for Spain in 1521.
The delta was already settled and farmed by Ilokano people, the Filipino ethnic group making the plain their home, and it was established as an important trading point between them and Chinese and possibly Japanese merchants before the Spanish. The Ilokano greeted Salcedo with little hostility apparently, despite his mission to expand Spanish rule and the Roman Catholic faith. The northeast corner of the delta inland where the river splits was later chosen as the site for a town and named after the son of Philip II of Spain, Ferdinand. Soon more commonly known as Vigan, it was to be the centre of government, religion, and commerce in northern Luzon for the next three centuries.
The initial stamp of Spain can be seen in town planning. Vigan's two squares, pivoting around a baroque eighteenth century church and bell tower, and grid pattern of streets, lined with large nineteenth century houses, follow a sixteenth century plan decreed by Philip II of Spain in his Lay de las Indias. All new towns in the Americas and the Philippines were to be laid out in an ordered way.
Running south from the squares are narrow streets lined almost entirely with two-storey houses built from the early 1800s to the early 1900s by well-to-do merchant and land-owning families. They were largely a 'mestizo' class of mixed Filipino, Chinese, and Spanish ancestry, who made their money from trade in indigo dye, locally woven cotton fabrics, tobacco, rice, corn, and gold, profiting in the eighteenth century especially from the galleon trade between the Philippines and Mexico.
Vigan grew until about the middle of the nineteenth century or so when its population reached a plateau. Life for the town ran on smoothly enough for the coming decades, but in the early twentieth century the town fell into a slow decline which continued up until recent years. Vigan did not become a large twentieth century city and regional centre in the way that Cebu did in the south. There are several reasons: Vigan as a government and church centre was no longer responsible for such a large area as more provinces and dioceses were created; better road communications with Manila meant other large towns did not need a secondary centre but could deal with Manila directly; and Vigan lacked a deep water port to deal with bigger trade volumes, relying on a port at the mouth of a river that became increasingly blocked with silt.
Fate smiled on Vigan though in World War II, keeping the town from the destruction experienced by Manila. Vigan escaped, so the story goes, because of a Japanese officer's concern for his local common-law wife and children. In one version, the Japanese soldiers were preparing to burn the town before the advancing Americans when the officer went to a local priest and asked him to take care of his wife and children. The priest said he would but advised that if the town were destroyed, then local people would seek revenge and want to harm his wife and children. As a result, the Japanese left without torching Vigan. In another version, the Japanese were secretly leaving the town and the officer again sought the priests' help. In this story, the priest took care of the wife and children and then through links with Filipino guerrillas told the Americans of the plan and in this way prevented the Americans bombing the town on the assumption that the Japanese were still there.
Conservation-inspired
rejuvenation
Today, the good fortune in 1945, and, ironically, the years of decline afterwards, have left intact an architectural past that may now rejuvenate the town. 'If we preserve the houses, people will come and the money will come,' says the chairman of the local residents' home protection group, Bong Donato. 'Vigan is nothing without these old houses.'
It is tourism that can justify devoting money to conservation for a town and its surrounding villages or barangay, where many poor families among the municipality's 45,000 population (9,000 in Vigan town itself) continue to live. There is a developing agenda to expand and improve health facilities, schools, water supply, roads, and other services.
The historic houses themselves, numbering nearly two hundred, are in various states of repair with some being well restored, and in several cases turned into guest-houses. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those that have been left derelict as families moved to Manila in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, still owning the properties but losing interest in maintaining them. Apart from neglect, another threat is a growing level of traffic in and around the historical area. Not only is this a matter of spoiling the ambience, it can also result in physical damage to the old buildings, juddered by the constant vibration of traffic along narrow streets.
Encouraging awareness of the importance of the houses has been the local owners' association, the Save Vigan Ancestral Homes Association (SVAHAI). The association which was formed in 1992 has battled hard. It has pushed for government to assist in their preservation and promoted the idea of nomination of Vigan as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Now with an activist and young mayor, Eva Marie Medina, herself a trained architect, combined with the Unesco listing and the obligations that that imposes on the Philippines government to protect the site, momentum for restoration and protection of Vigan should increase. Recently, the local council passed a new ordinance laying down guidelines for home restoration and development in the town. But it will take some leadership to win all homeowners over to their side. As Bong Donato says, some homeowners have regarded the idea of local regulations for building development, use, and maintenance consistent with heritage goals as reminiscent of the martial law days of the former President Marcos in the 1970s. 'People have to be reassured they have not lost their freedom. It will take a few years to educate the homeowners,' Donato says.
Tourism itself can be a double-edged sword as inappropriate tourism can result in degradation and the corruption of sites and their presentation in ways not true to their history. Vigan should not find itself, as one homeowner says, with a string of Spanish 'tapas' bars and flamenco music. Another danger is the concentration of the financial benefits of tourism in the hands of a few. Vigan must spread the benefits to its outlying villages, otherwise they will resent efforts to preserve architectural heritage, seeing it as the province only of town dwellers, descended from the wealthy mestizo class which Sionil Jose describes as living so differently from the Ilocano villagers a century ago. There are already signs, however, of ways village people may benefit from heritage tourism. Demand for local crafts, such as pottery, brick- and tile-making, furniture, and weaving, are rising as houses are restored and the numbers of tourists visiting Vigan increase.
Work is now underway to combine heritage preservation with wider socio-economic development. An urban master plan for local and higher levels of government is being prepared, funded by the Philippines and Spanish Governments. This is to guide not only architectural preservation and tourism, but also wider town infrastructure development. As architect, Fatima Rabang-Alonzo, co-project team leader, says, 'It is not just a matter of restoring long rows of houses but revitalizing the whole town.'
Tourism and development, as important as they are, are only parts of the reason to protect Vigan's historical character says Rabang-Alonzo, a locally born Ilokano. 'A place without a history is like a man without memory,' she says. 'We can go back to the past and gather inspiration. We can recognize the works of our local builders. The people who built the houses were not Spanish, they were local people. We admire their ingenuity and the sacrifice they put into it, especially for the church. They were builders and artisans.' *
Andrew Symon is an Australian journalist who has been working in Asia since 1992.
He is currently a Singapore-based editor for the UK Financial Times Group.
E-mail: andrew.symon@pacific.net.sg