PhilFAQS

I’ve decided that in general on Tuesdays I am going to write more about “going around” to different places in the Philippines.  They won’t always be monumental trips but I do move about the country and the Unofficial Cook reminded me the other day that except for our lovely but too short jaunt to Macau the other week I have been sitting on my big round behind way too often.

Friday last we went on a little jaunt to something quite historic and close by, but I decided to start the weekly series with a trip to something much closer to the true beginnings of the Philippines that we made a couple years back.

There is a running joke in the US that varies from place to place that makes the assertion that people who live near famous or historic tourist attractions never visit them.   If you live, lets say in the New York metro area the story goes you probably have never visited the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building … I grew up in sight of them both and I am only one for 2 … been to the Empire State building several times, my wife and I visited Ellis Island but when we continued on to the Statue it was closing time, so the closest I got, ever, has been to view her from the deck of a ferry at the ferry landing.

These anecdotes can probably be continued for almost any city in the US, and I suspect also apply to Filipinos and famous Philippine sites about the same.

But I did begin at the beginning, or near enough to the beginning here in the Philippines.  Several years ago my wife and I visited Cebu … a really nice place by the way and very popular as a place to live for many expats, and among the many sites we visited was one of the very earliest markers of the absolute beginning of the Philippines as a nation or entity called the Philippines …

Magellan’s Cross

As our friends at Wikipedia tell us:

Magellan’s Cross is a Christian cross planted by Portuguese and Spanish explorers as ordered by Ferdinand Magellan upon arriving in Cebu in the Philippines on April 21, 1521.

This cross is housed in a small chapel next to the Basilica Minore del Santo Niño on Magallanes Street (Magallanes being the Spanish name of Magellan), just in front of the city hall of Cebu City. A sign below the cross claims that the original cross is encased inside the wooden cross that is found in the center of this chapel. This is to protect the original cross from people who chipped away parts of the cross for souvenir purposes or in the belief that the cross possesses miraculous powers.^[1] Some people, however, believe that the original cross had been destroyed or had disappeared after Magellan’s death, and the cross is a replica that was planted there by the Spaniards after they successfully colonized the Philippines.^[2][3][4]

Magellan’s Cross is a symbol of Cebu City and the chapel’s image can be found in its city seal. It is also seen as the symbol of Roman Catholicism and a tourist attraction in the Philippines.

This is to me a worthwhile visit, if for no other reason than to look at something set in motion more than 100 years before there was even a place called the USA.  Many Americans (since history is hardly taught in US schools any more, or if taught is usually relegated to the football coach in the off season) think the US has been around for a long time and sometimes are afflicted by the notion that the US knows it all.

Well we do know a lot and I remain a proud nation and one with many tings that others might emulate, but we sure didn’t found the modern worlds and we aren’t the center of it.  I’m a big believer in knowing what went on elsewhere to be able to put things in perspective and also to find out what other countries did right and did wrong so we, as Americans, are better equipped to know what we ought to be proud of, and why.

Magellan actually never saw the cross, he was killed on Mactan Island, just across a narrow straight from Cebu City by a warrior named Rajah Lapu-Lapu, a Filipino progenitor who did not value meekness and refused to believe the propaganda that the Spanish promulgated about how good life would be if the Filipinos would just make themselves subservient to the Spanish who “came in peace” with the best interests of the native people at heart.  Yeah, right.

Regretfully I didn’t get to go see the monument commemorating the “Battle of Mactan” which commemorates both Lapu-Lapu and Magellan, but I have it on my list for another visit, soon.

Magellan, you may recall, has lived on in history as the man who made the first circumnavigation of the globe, another  in a long list of historical “facts” like bell and the telephone and Marconi and the radio which the football coaches over the years have gotten wrong.  The 18 survivors of Magellan’s crew completed the first known circumnavigation of the globe, but Magellan was given the honor, posthumously, based on the fact that he had sailed east from Portugal in the past as far as the Philippines (the 1521 fiasco, when Magellan got himself killed by foolishly attacking 1,500 Filipino warriors with a force of 48 … (was Magellan in George Armstrong Custer’s family tree I wonder?) … was not his first trip to the Philippines, so one trip plus one trip equaled the whole job.  Funny how it works that way, because the 18 men who did complete the first true circumnavigation of the globe are virtually unknown.

Anyway, certainly worth a visit, and as the place most associated with the real beginnings of what is now the Republic of the Philippines, I highly recommend it.  (if you do visit Cebu, I highly recommend this hotel as well, a very nice place).

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