Boracay

Boracay's first inhabitants were the Ati, part of the Negrito peoples of Panay, and the Panay Bukidnon, who fished and gathered along its coasts long before the island had any reputation. A Visayan settler population arrived later from the mainland, and under Spanish rule the island was an obscure corner of Aklan with coconut plantations, a little fishing and a trade in the small puka shells that give one beach its name. It stayed that way well into the 20th century, without electricity, roads or a pier.

The change came with backpackers in the 1970s, who reached the island by outrigger from Caticlan and slept in huts along the sand. Word spread through guidebooks in the 1980s, and by the 1990s Boracay had appeared in international rankings of the world's best beaches. Building followed faster than water supply, drainage or waste treatment could keep up, and by the 2010s the island was receiving around two million visitors a year on a strip four kilometres long.

In 2018 the national government closed Boracay for six months for an environmental clean-up, ordering sewage connections, the demolition of structures built too close to the shore and the clearing of the beach itself. The closure cost thousands of islanders their income for half a year and remains the defining recent event here. Since the reopening, building, drainage, visitor numbers and conduct on the sand have been more tightly regulated than before, and the island's central problem — how many people a small island can carry — is still argued over. The Ati community's claim to ancestral land on the island has run alongside all of this, and remains sensitive.

Boracay is a resort island with a working town behind it, and the two sides sit close together. Most residents are migrants from Aklan, Antique and the wider Visayas who came for work in the resorts; they speak Aklanon and other Visayan languages, live in the inland and southern barangays, and keep the ordinary calendar of a Philippine town — fiestas, basketball leagues, chapel services, karaoke at weekends.

The island's own traditions are maritime. The paraw, a double-outrigger sailing boat with crab-claw sails, is a Visayan design still sailed here daily, and boat building and sailing races are a point of local pride. Sunset on White Beach is a communal event rather than a private one, with people gathering along the water as the paraws pass. Aklan's greatest festival, Ati-Atihan, is celebrated on the mainland at Kalibo in January, and its drumbeat and blackened costumes are part of the province's identity.

The Ati, among the island's original inhabitants, now number only a small community, and their settlement and land claim are a live subject locally. Visitors are expected to keep swimwear to the beach, to respect the rules on alcohol, noise and plastics introduced after 2018, and to treat the island as somewhere people live and worship rather than simply a resort. Evening life on the beachfront is part of the island's reputation, but it operates within those rules.

Nearly 38,000 people lived in Boracay's three barangays at the 2020 census, most of them in Manoc-Manoc and Balabag away from White Beach, in dense streets of concrete houses, boarding rooms, shops and workshops. Almost everyone works in or around tourism: resorts, restaurants, boats, dive schools, construction, laundries, massage huts and the tricycles that run the length of the island. Fishing continues on a small scale, and a good deal of food and building material arrives daily by barge from Caticlan.

The day runs to the shifts of the resorts and the wind. Deliveries and the wet market are done early, the beach fills in the afternoon, and the evening belongs to the restaurants along the sand. Workers commute across the island by tricycle, and many send money home to families on Panay or further afield.

The recurring problems are those of a small, crowded island: fresh water and its cost, drainage and sewage, rubbish disposal, traffic on the single road, and electricity carried over from the mainland. Work is highly seasonal, and the 2018 closure showed how little cushion most households have when the visitors stop. Residents are, as a result, closely attentive to policy decisions made in Manila about their island.

The island eats from the sea. Fish, squid, prawns and crab are grilled over charcoal and served with garlic rice and calamansi, and the usual arrangement is to buy the catch by weight at the wet market near Station 2 and have one of the adjoining eateries cook it. Kinilaw, raw fish cured in vinegar and calamansi with onion and ginger, and sinigang, a sour tamarind broth, are the other standards.

Aklan's mainland dishes appear too — inubaran, chicken stewed with banana pith, coconut milk and a souring fruit, is an Aklanon speciality — alongside the national repertoire of adobo, lechon, pancit and grilled pork skewers. At the cheap end, carinderias in the residential barangays serve rice with a choice from a few pots, and the chori burger, a grilled Filipino sausage in a bun with relish, has been sold from stands along the beach path for decades.

Because the island's visitors come from everywhere, the beachfront and the shopping complex behind it also serve Korean, Japanese, Italian and Indian food, and there are bakeries, coffee shops and juice stalls in numbers no town of this size would otherwise support. Fresh buko, the water of a young coconut, mango shakes and halo-halo, shaved ice with sweet beans, fruit and milk, are the standard answers to the afternoon heat.