Cebu City

Cebu was a trading settlement before Europe knew of it, its rulers dealing in Chinese porcelain, gold and slaves across the Visayan seas. Ferdinand Magellan anchored here in April 1521, and the ruler Rajah Humabon and his household were baptised; the image of the Santo Niño given at that ceremony survives and is still venerated. Weeks later Magellan was killed on Mactan by Lapulapu, and the survivors of the expedition sailed on. Miguel López de Legazpi returned in 1565, took the settlement and founded the Villa del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús, the first permanent Spanish town in the archipelago, before the capital moved to Manila six years later.

Left behind by that move, Cebu spent two centuries as a garrison and mission town, its fort guarding against raids from the southern sultanates. Trade revived in the 19th century when the port opened to foreign ships, and the city became the collecting point for the sugar, abaca and copra of the central islands, drawing Chinese merchants who settled in Parian and whose descendants still run much of the local economy. Revolutionary fighting reached Cebu in 1898, and American rule followed.

Japanese forces held the city from 1942, and the bombing and fighting of the liberation in 1945 destroyed much of the centre, which is why so little Spanish building survives outside the old core. Post-war Cebu rebuilt as a port and industrial city, exported furniture, garments and its people, and from the 1990s added export-processing zones on Mactan and, later, the call centres that now fill its business districts. The city today is the country's second economic centre and the hinge of the whole Visayan region.

Cebu is the capital of the Cebuano-speaking world, and the language — Bisaya to almost everyone here — is a point of identity rather than a dialect of anything. Cebuanos are known for humour, directness and a long-running friendly rivalry with Manila, and the city has produced much of the country's popular music, comedy and, through its dance troupes and choirs, a great deal of its performance tradition.

Faith and festival are inseparable here. The Santo Niño devotion that began in 1521 remains the centre of religious life, expressed in the novena that fills the basilica every Friday, the candle-sellers who dance prayers on request in the forecourt, and above all Sinulog in January, when hundreds of thousands of people watch costumed contingents dance through the streets to a drumbeat of two steps forward and one back. Holy Week empties the city and fills the churches; Christmas begins with dawn Masses in December.

Older Cebuano manners persist: the mano, taking an elder's hand to the forehead, po and opo in speech, and an obligation to bring pasalubong home from any trip, which is why the dried-fish and mango stalls do such trade. The Chinese-Filipino community, established for centuries in Parian, keeps its own temples, associations and schools. Basketball courts fill every open space, cockfighting remains legal and popular in the provinces, and the boxing tradition of the Visayas has produced generations of champions.

About 965,000 people live within the city limits and some 3.2 million in Metro Cebu, the conurbation that runs from Talisay through Mandaue to Lapu-Lapu on Mactan. The city climbs from a narrow coastal strip into steep hills, and the social map follows the slope: dense low-rise neighbourhoods and the port below, gated subdivisions and view restaurants above, with the planned business districts inserted in between.

Work divides between the port and shipyards, manufacturing and the export zones on Mactan, furniture and guitar making, tourism, and the business-process outsourcing industry, whose offices run through the night and have given the city a genuine late-night economy of food parks, cafés and bars. Remittances from Cebuanos working at sea and abroad matter to a great many households; the city supplies a large share of the world's merchant seafarers.

Daily life is shaped by heat and traffic. Days begin early, the markets before dawn, and jeepney and motorcycle traffic congeals on the main roads twice a day; malls serve as the air-conditioned public space, and evenings belong to barbecue stalls and basketball courts. The recurring problems are congestion, flooding in heavy rain, water supply, informal settlement on the hillsides and along the creeks, and an earthquake risk that the region takes seriously.

Cebu's reputation rests on lechon. The whole pig is stuffed with lemongrass, spring onions, garlic and chilli before roasting over charcoal, so the meat is seasoned throughout and eaten without the liver sauce used elsewhere; the towns of Carcar and Talisay south of the city are the acknowledged sources. It comes with puso, rice boiled inside woven pouches of palm leaf that hang in bunches at every grill and are torn open by hand.

Grilled food is the everyday habit. At barbecue yards such as Larsian, skewers of pork, chicken intestine, wings and fish go onto charcoal and are eaten with puso and a vinegar dip. On Mactan the seafood places offer sutukil, a coinage from sugba, tula and kilaw — the same fish grilled, in soup and cured raw in vinegar. Ngohiong, a Cebuano spring roll seasoned with five-spice and fried, shows the Chinese layer in the city's cooking, as does the noodle soup sold in the downtown eateries. Tuslob buwa, bread dipped into a bubbling pan of pork brain and liver, is a street speciality of the Pasil district.

Sweets and pasalubong are an industry in themselves: dried mangoes, otap, the flaky oval puff-pastry biscuit, rosquillos rings, masareal peanut bars from Mandaue, and danggit, the dried rabbitfish sold by the kilo at Taboan and fried for breakfast with rice, egg and vinegar.