I’ve heard about the famed The Ruins in Talisay City, Negros Occidental (just north of Bacolod) from various travel and photo blogs (such as this blog post by Byahilo). Well, I got even more interested when Jayvee disclosed that the first owner of the house, Don Mariano Ledesma Lacson, a famous sugar tycoon, was his great-great-grandfather. Jayvee’s blog post puts a nice personal touch to an otherwise run-of-the-mill travelogue entry: parts of his family’s history—as it relates to the ancestral home—provides a nice background to this relatively new tourist attraction.

Photo by Shale Albao. (CC)

Anyway, I tried to see if I could find this ancestral home in Google Maps. The biggest lead I got was this Wikimapia entry. But since the general level of quality in Wikimapia is a bit low, I opened up Google Earth, browsed through the available historical satellite imagery in the area, and confirmed that the house’s shape in the satellite imagery indeed matches the tons of pictures of the house in Flickr and elsewhere. (I’m willing to bet that The Ruins is the most-photographed site in the Bacolod-Talisay-Silay area.)

Well, it can’t be helped that The Ruins is a photographer’s delight. The skeletal structure is quite picturesque and it’s surrounded by lush rural greenery. (One of the best times to photograph the house is during dusk—the so-called “golden hour”.) It’s no wonder then that it’s a popular event venue for shows, weddings, and receptions.

Download KML file (for Google Earth)