It’s been a while since I last featured a lighthouse, and it has also been a while since there’s been a sight that was a superlative in some respect. So let’s now fix that by visiting the highest lighthouse in the Philippines, the Cape Bojeador Lighthouse, also known as the Burgos Lighthouse after the town where it is located. This lighthouse lies at the northwesternmost corner of Luzon and guides ships passing through the Luzon Strait. The tower has a height of about 16 meters and is positioned on a hill about 70 meters above sea level, making the lighthouse’s lamp the highest in the country.

Photo by John Ryan Cordova. (CC)

Built in 1892, in the same era as the lighthouse at Capones Island, the Cape Bojeador Lighthouse is one of the most popular tourist attractions this side of Luzon and possibly the most visited lighthouse in the country. I think it rivals the nearby Bangui Windmills in terms of tourist arrivals. From the main highway, you just need to turn into an inlandward road (there’s a sign marking the entrance) and then drive up a spiraling road (quite visible in Google Maps) encircling the hill of the lighthouse. If I’m not mistaken, basic lodging and amenities are provided for tourists at the pavilion beside the tower.

Because of its stature as one of the best-preserved Spanish lighthouses in the Philippines, the Cape Bojeador Lighthouse was declared a National Cultural Treasure and a National Historical Landmark.

If you want to learn more, then this narrative at WaypointsDotPH contains tons of historical information about the lighthouse. Plus, it has lots more pictures. The Heritage Conservation Society blog also has a long article about this lighthouse.

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I’ve featured the controversial C-5 Road Extension before and there is still a long way to go before the full circumferential road will be completed, linking R-1 Road (or the Coastal Road) all the way to R-9 (or the MacArthur Highway). Complementing the C-5 Road is the C-6 Road, which is an even bigger circumferential road that will mostly lie outside Metro Manila. This road has the working name of Bulacan-Rizal-Manila-Cavite Regional Expressway and may be named as the Padre Jacinto Zamora Super Highway.

Construction has already started and visible portion is in Taguig City. It’s still not completely open to traffic because the surface is still unpaved but joggers, runners, bicycles, and tricycles have been known to use the road already. Currently, the southern terminus is at Barangay Lower Bicutan in Taguig and connects with the intersection of M.L. Quezon and Gen. Paulino Santos Avenue. From here, the nearest major intersection is the Bicutan exit of SLEx.

Just like with the C-5 Road, we can expect the completion of C-6 Road to be fraught with lots of delays and tons of problems. Buying the right-of-way will definitely be a huge impediment and that’s not counting the bidding of construction which are often corruption magnets. If you’re interested, go to the C-6 Road thread at the SkyscraperCity Forums to follow up on the developments of this road. (Plus they have tons of pictures and maps to help illustrate the discussions.)

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Today, July 16, 2010, marks the 20th anniversary of the devastating 1990 Luzon Earthquake. One of the cities most devastated by this disaster is Baguio. Plenty of buildings in the resort city collapsed and landslides left Baguio isolated for a few days. One of the famous destroyed buildings in Baguio is the Hyatt Terraces Hotel located along South Drive. The central wing of the hotel collapsed on itself killing 98 guests and hotel employees. To this day, the site of the former hotel remains undeveloped and is a famous supposed ghost haunt in Baguio.

Photo by Ferdz Decena.

Before the hotel’s collapse, the Hyatt was one of the “in” destinations in the city. Baguio was a popular convention and conference destination and the five-star Hyatt was probably the top hotel in Baguio for booking. Its magnificent terraced lobby (see these pictures shared at SkyscraperCity) was a sight to behold and its location near Camp John Hay was ideal. In addition, a casino was housed in the building. In fact, a seminar organized by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was being held in the hotel when the earthquake struck. Many of its attendees were among the casualties.

Read this Inquirer article where a former hotel manager at Hyatt recounts her harrowing tale of the hotel’s collapse and her subsequent rescue. The photo above by Ferdz Decena shows what remains of the fountain that was found in front of the hotel.

What I most remember about the impact of the earthquake at Hyatt was that our family doctor was among the dead. Aside from that, the earthquake was not quite memorable in my young mind aside from the news coverage. I didn’t feel the tremor since I was in a school bus on the way home from school.

How about you? What were your memories of the July 16, 1990 earthquake?

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If you’ve ever been to Baguio and looked around at the surrounding mountains, then I’m sure you have already seen the Mickey-Mouse ears pair of radar dishes nestled on a mountain peak to the south of the city. Well, that mountain is called Mt. Cabuyao and those dishes are for tropospheric scatter communications. These dishes were built by the Americans and was meant to link to a similar site in Taiwan and then to Okinawa.

Mt. Cabuyao is actually just a child peak of the taller Mt. Sto. Tomas whose peak is located about 2.5 kilometers further to the south and 200 meters higher. Mt. Sto. Tomas is the highest peak nearest to Baguio. As such, the peak has tons of TV and radio masts serving Metro Baguio.

Photo from Arcibaldo.

Check out this snippet I took from this web page that talked about the history of those dishes:

As a result we were able to have the Armed Forces of the Philippines acquire the site we selected on Mt. St. Tomas, which we called Cabuyo. The US Army was then allowed to be a tenant on this site. This resulted in a program to improve this link and make improvements in the extension of this system through Taiwan and on to Okinawa. This was known as the Phil-Tai-Oki Troposcatter System. Page Engineers won the contract and they installed two 120-foot troposcatter dishes at Cabuyo.

I thought that these dishes had something to do with the weather, but as mentioned above, they are for communication purposes. Now the question that I haven’t found the answer for is whether this site is still operational. Can anyone enlighten us?

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Since I’ve featured Iloilo City’s Jaro Belfry more than 2 years ago, I guess now it’s time to do a post about the belfry’s associated church itself, the Jaro Metropolitan Cathedral (Wikipedia article). I’ve said before that the Jaro Belfry is among the minority of belltowers that stand apart from its church. In Jaro’s case, its church and belfry is probably the farthest apart in the country.

Anyway, the Jaro Cathedral, being a cathedral, means that it is the seat of a diocese, and since it is a metropolitan cathedral, it additionally signifies that the diocese is an archdiocese, namely the Archdiocese of Jaro, and has suffragan dioceses under it, which are the dioceses of San Jose de Antique, Bacolod, Kabankalan, and San Carlos. The archdiocese is one of the oldest in the country and was once under the See of Manila.

Photo by Kurt Guirnela. (CC)

The cathedral is officially called the Parish of Our Lady of Candles (Nuestra Señora de Candelaria) whose feast day is on February 2. The statue of the Virgin Mary above the entrance, according to Wikipedia, was canonically crowned by Pope John Paul II in 1982 and is supposedly the only religious image in the country to receive such an honor. She has also been designated as the patroness of Western Visayas. In addition, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary is also another patron saint of the parish.

Finally, according to the marker on the church placed by the National Historical Institute, this church is where Iloilo’s preeminent son, Graciano López Jaena, was baptized.

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Located quite a bit to the north of downtown Puerto Princesa City in Palawan is the Ramon V. Mitra, Jr. Sports Complex. This sports complex was named after the city’s preeminent son Ramon Mitra, Jr. who became the Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1987 to 1992. He died in 2000 at the age of 72 due to liver cancer.

The sports complex was refurbished a few years ago since Puerto Princesa City became host of the 2008 Palarong Pambansa (National Games) held from April 20 to 27. This is an annual national amateur sports event for high school and college students representing their administrative regions. Unsurprisingly, Metro Manila has been the overall champion for five years now, from 2006 to 2010. Puerto Princesa and Palawan have used this Palarong Pambansa to promote their place as the Sports Tourism Capital of the Philippines.

What you can see now in the thumbnail image is the main site containing the requisite track and field stadium. To the side are what I assume are tennis courts and further to the south are the swimming pool and basketball courts.

Check out this runner blogger’s post about the quality of the facilities back in 2009. I wonder if Puerto Princesa is succeeding in maintaining the quality up till now.

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I’ve already featured Pangasinan’s San Roque Dam back in 2006 and there I showed a side-by-side satellite imagery of the area before the dam was completed and after the dam was completed and the reservoir was filled up.

Well, I recently saw that Google added some high-resolution satellite imagery in Pangasinan dated last April 3, 2010 and it dramatically showed the effect of the El Niño phenomenon on the water level of the reservoir. Quite visible in the satellite imagery is the light fringe surrounding the reservoir which depicts how much lower the water level is at the dam. Below is a side-by-side illustration of the water level at the dam at its peak level (imagery taken on November 25, 2006) and the April 3 imagery. You can see both images for yourself on Google Earth using the historical imagery feature. Notice that in the 2006 imagery, the water level has reached the spillway to the left of the dam while in the 2010 imagery, the water level is far from it.

Using Google Earth, I estimated the water level in the 2006 image to be around 280 meters above sea level while the 2010 water level is around 240 meters. That’s a difference of about 40 meters! I don’t know how much that translates into cubic meters of water. (Note: these water levels are just estimates since Google’s terrain data, which is based on SRTM, is not high-resolution.)

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I haven’t featured Surigao del Norte yet here in Vista Pinas so let’s go to Siargao and see the tiny island of Guyam! (Guyam Island is spelled as Guyang Island in some online databases.) Try to imagine the typical tropical deserted island having a small grove of coconut trees and where shipwrecked people usually get stranded on. Well, Guyam Island looks like one. I’m guessing that it is precisely Guyam’s cliché tropical island image that is the reason why it was featured on the cover of the 8th Edition of the Lonely Planet Philippines travel book.

This uninhabited islet, about 150 meters in diameter, is not really an island one can get stranded on because it is located merely 2 kilometers from the main island of Siargao, facing the town poblacion of General Luna. And it is around 10 minutes away by pumpboat. I’ve even read that you can supposedly swim or walk to the island during low tide and that it is definitely reachable by just kayaking.

Photo by Richard Parker. (CC)

Guyam Island is surrounded by nice white sand (some say it’s powdery while another account says grainy) and it’s a nice place to have a daytime picnic (there are huts there), to go snorkelling, or simply to bum on the beach. The island also supposedly offers a nice view of the raging surfing waves that Siargao is best known for.

Despite being tiny, this small island has quite a lot of charm for the island lovers, and one blogger has even declared Guyam Island as one of his most favorite islands in the Philippines.

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Europeans are sick and tired of seeing windmills but in the Philippines where these tall, sleek, and white towers of power and beauty are still a novelty, the Bangui windmills are a veritable tourist spot in this otherwise unremarkable Ilocos Norte town. Operated by the NorthWind Power Development Corporation (NWPDC), a Danish company, these windmills generate around 25 MW of electricity and provides about 40% of Ilocos Norte’s power requirements. Phase 1 of the project constructed 15 windmills with each one 325m distant from the next and stretching for almost 3 kilometers along the Bangui Bay coastline facing the South China Sea. There’s supposed to be a Phase 2 that will increase the number of windmills to 20 in 2008 but I can’t find any information that this additional construction indeed pushed through. Update (July 19): due to additional satellite imagery added by Google on July 14, I can confirm that there are at least 19 turbines now, so Phase 2 indeed pushed through.

Photo by John Ryan Cordova. (CC)

The Bangui farm is usually stated as the first wind farm in the Philippines and the largest in Southeast Asia (no other country in SEA has the wind potential of typhoon-ravaged Philippines). But the windmills of Bangui are not actually the first wind farm. If my research is correct, the 3-windmill 180-kWh wind farm in Mahatao, Batanes, which I’ve featured before, was constructed earlier. But the Mahatao farm is a hybrid diesel-wind farm and that makes the Bangui farm the first pure wind farm. I wasn’t able to feature the Bangui Wind Farm before now since it was only late last month that Google added high-resolution satellite imagery of this area. In fact, only the 10 westernmost wind turbines are covered by the imagery. The rest cannot be seen. Update (July 19): due to additional satellite imagery added by Google on July 14, we can now see 19 turbines.

Incidentally, the windmill in the thumbnail picture above is the third one from the west. If you check it out in Google Maps and pan a bit to the southwest, you can see a couple of buildings and I am assuming that this is the visitor center that NWPDC constructed to cater to the throngs of tourists that flock to this area.

If you want more information, then this PCIJ feature article doesn’t disappoint.

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Happy 112th anniversary of the declaration of Philippine independence! To celebrate this historic day, let’s go to Angeles City and virtually visit the Pamintuan Mansion, the site where Gen. Aguinaldo celebrated the first anniversary on June 12, 1899. By that time, the fledging Philippine Republic was in the midst of a war with the United States and Filipino forces were forced to retreat northward when the Americans captured Manila, thus the celebration in Pampanga. In his speech during that anniversary, Aguinaldo said that the “Filipinas is for the Filipinos”, repudiating America’s claim to the Philippine Islands.

The Pamintuan Mansion itself has had quite a bit of a history. Based on Internet research (so take this with a grain of salt), this residence was constructed by the Pamintuan couple, Don Mariano and Valentina Torres, in the 1890s as a wedding gift for their only son Florentino (who later became an alcalde [mayor] of Angeles in 1900 under American rule). During the Philippine-American War, the mansion became the seat of the Philippine Republic as well the presidential residence. So it was on June 12, 1899, the first anniversary of the declaration of Philippine independence, that Gen. Aguinaldo waved the Philippine flag from the second-floor balcony of the mansion as a parade passed by on the street below. This was the same flag that he displayed a year earlier at his home in Kawit, Cavite. The photo below shows a reenactment.

Photo by angeles gallery

The Americans, however, managed to rout the Filipinos from Pampanga by July 1899 and Gen. Arthur MacArthur then occupied the Pamintuan residence. During World War II, the Japanese also used the house as a base when they conquered the area. After the war, in 1959, the house came under the ownership of the Tablante family until it was finally donated to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in 1981. The central bank then had the mansion undergo a five-year restoration and the building now serves as a regional clearing office of the BSP.

Despite the mansion’s place in history, it had not been selected as a primary venue of national Independence Day celebrations unlike Rizal Park and the Aguinaldo Shrine. A local history and culture group, the Kuliat Foundation Inc. (KFI) (“Kuliat” was the old name of Angeles), has undertaken the task of bringing to the forefront the role of Pamintuan Mansion in history.

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