Cagayan de Oro

The settlement that became Cagayan de Oro began upriver. Huluga, on bluffs above the Cagayan de Oro River, was an inhabited site long before the Spanish arrived, and the village there, known to the missionaries as Himologan, stood under its own datu when Augustinian Recollect friars reached it in 1622. Its chief, Datu Salangsang, was persuaded in 1626 to move the community downstream to the present site, where a church was built beside what is now Gaston Park and the town of Cagayan took shape as a mission centre and small port on Macajalar Bay.

Its position on the north coast, at the mouth of a navigable river and at the foot of the route into the Bukidnon plateau, made it a natural trading point. The Philippine–American War reached it in June 1900, when Filipino forces defeated American troops at Macahambus Hill, the first Filipino victory of that campaign. Under American rule the town became the capital of Misamis Oriental, gained schools and a pier, and drew migrants from the Visayas. It was occupied during the Second World War and badly damaged in 1945, and rebuilt afterwards; a city charter followed in 1950, when the name Cagayan de Oro was formally adopted.

Post-war growth was fast. The port, the highway system, Xavier University and a string of colleges, and industries on the coast east and west of the city turned it into the commercial centre of northern Mindanao. In December 2011 Tropical Storm Washi, known locally as Sendong, sent the river over riverside barangays at night and killed more than a thousand people in Cagayan de Oro and neighbouring Iligan, the worst disaster in the city's history and the reason for much of the flood engineering and relocation housing visible today.

The city calls itself the City of Golden Friendship, and its August fiesta, Higalaay, takes its name from the Cebuano word for friend. The festival marks the feast of Saint Augustine, the town's patron, and combines Mass and procession with street dancing, a float parade on the river, fairs and concerts — the one week when the whole city is on the streets. Holy Week and the long Christmas season, with its dawn Masses, are the other fixed points of the year.

Cagayan de Oro is a Cebuano-speaking, Catholic, migrant city: most families trace themselves to the Visayas or to the surrounding Misamis countryside within a few generations, and it sits at the meeting point of settler, Indigenous and Muslim Mindanao. Higaonon and other lumad communities from the hills come down to the markets, students arrive from across the region, and there is a small Muslim population with its own quarter and mosques. That mixture is reflected in the university museums and in the crafts and textiles sold in town.

It is above all a student city — Xavier University, founded by Jesuits, and a dozen other colleges give it a young population — and an outdoors one, with the river, the highlands and the bay close enough to structure weekends. Basketball courts fill every barangay, karaoke carries from houses on Sunday afternoons, and the evening promenade along the plaza is a long-standing habit.

About 740,000 people live in the city, which spreads from the bay up onto the plateau behind and is the largest urban centre in northern Mindanao. Divisoria and the old streets west of the river hold the offices and the markets; Lapasan and the Recto Avenue corridor hold the malls and much of the formal employment; and the population lives in a wide ring of barangays, from middle-class subdivisions in Macasandig to dense, poorer settlements on the riverbanks and coastal strips.

The economy rests on the port and the regional trade it carries, on food processing and light manufacturing in the coastal industrial zones, on outsourcing offices that employ thousands of young English speakers on night shifts, and on education and healthcare for the whole of the region. Agriculture in the hinterland — pineapple, corn, coconut, sugar and coffee from Bukidnon — moves through the city, and tourism adds the rafting operators and the traffic heading on to Camiguin.

Daily life runs early: markets before dawn, school and office traffic that gridlocks the bridges by seven, and a second peak in the evening when the plaza and the malls fill. Flooding remains the central civic issue, along with housing for families relocated after 2011, water supply, and the congestion that comes with a city growing faster than its road network.

Cagayan de Oro eats Cebuano-style food with a strong bias towards grilled meat and fresh fish from Macajalar Bay. Kinilaw — raw fish cured in vinegar and calamansi with onion, ginger and chilli — is the regional dish, and sinuglaw combines it with grilled pork belly in one plate. Lechon, whole roast pig, appears at every celebration, and barbecue stalls grilling pork skewers, chicken intestines and sausages over coals are a fixture of the evening streets. Rice, always, and a soup such as tinola or the sour sinigang beside it.

The inland highlands supply the city's other specialities. Binaki, sweet steamed corn cakes in husk wrappers, are sold warm at terminals and markets; Bukidnon coffee and pineapple come down the same road; and highland vegetables fill the Cogon Market stalls. From Camiguin come pastel, soft buns filled with milk-and-egg yema, sold in boxes all over the city, and lanzones when the crop comes in.

Merienda between meals means puto and other rice cakes, bibingka, banana cue, and halo-halo shaved ice with beans, fruit and purple ube. The student population supports a large cheap-eating scene of carinderias, milk-tea shops and late-night silog plates of garlic rice, egg and cured meat, while the malls carry the national chains and Korean and Japanese restaurants.