Leandro Locsin, possibly the greatest Filipino architect, supposedly considered the Provincial Capitol Building of Negros Occidental in Bacolod City as the most beautiful capitol building in the country. Well, he may have been quite biased since he grew up in Silay, Negros Occidental, but I would have to admit that the building has an imposing architecture.

The capitol building was built from 1924 to 1935 in the style of American neoclassical and Beaux-Arts architecture. It housed the Provincial Government until the building fell into a state of disrepair that it was abandoned. It was then turned over to the Negros Cultural Foundation which then converted it into the Negros Museum that opened in 1996. Well, the building was restored and so the provincial government took the building again, and the Negros Museum then moved to the nearby building that previously housed the provincial government. (You might say that the museum gets the scraps of the government, hehehe.)

Photo by a certain Kyle1008.

To the front and east of the capitol is a large man-made lagoon with a pair of carabao statues on both ends of it. I remember seeing this lagoon when I went to Bacolod before, but it’s too bad that I wasn’t able to visit the capitol building itself then.

The shape of the capitol building’s footprint with its wings (as you can see in the thumbnail) actually reminds me of one famous building: the United States Capitol. If the Negros Occidental Capitol had a huge dome in the middle, it would probably look a lot like a miniature U.S. Capitol. Hehehe.

Download KML file (for Google Earth)