Coron

The Calamian Islands were settled long before Spanish rule by the Tagbanwa, who fished the bays and whose culture is bound to the caves and lakes of Coron Island. Spain reached the islands in the 17th century and built fortified churches and watchtowers against raiding from the south — a fort and church went up at Culion around 1670 — with Culion, not Coron, the first permanent Spanish settlement in the group and Coron only its visita. Coron itself remained a small fishing and trading settlement for centuries, its Busuanga hinterland given over to grazing.

The event that shaped the town's modern reputation came on 24 September 1944, when American carrier aircraft attacked Japanese naval and supply ships sheltering in the waters around Busuanga and sank most of them. The wrecks settled in bays close to the town at depths reachable by recreational divers, and from the 1980s onwards they drew divers from around the world, turning Coron into a diving destination before it was anything else.

The rest followed later. Improved flights to Busuanga airport, ferries from Manila and El Nido and the spread of island-hopping tourism in the 2000s and 2010s brought visitors who never intended to dive, drawn by the lakes and lagoons of Coron Island. Tagbanwa communities won formal recognition of ancestral-domain rights over Coron Island and its fishing grounds in June 1998 and manage access and fees there themselves, one of the clearer cases in the Philippines of Indigenous title shaping a tourism economy. The town has grown quickly and unevenly along its bay ever since.

Coron's population mixes long-settled Calamian families, Tagbanwa communities, and migrants from the Visayas and Luzon who came for fishing, ranching and later tourism. Tagalog and Cuyonon are widely spoken alongside English, and Visayan languages are heard on the waterfront. Catholicism organises the public year, with the parish church in the town centre, Holy Week processions, and a town fiesta that brings families home.

The Tagbanwa presence is the distinctive thread. Their ancestral domain covers Coron Island and its waters, several lakes there are considered sacred and closed, and the community controls who lands where and what fees are paid. Visitors encounter this as a set of rules on a day trip; locally it is a hard-won legal and cultural settlement, and guides are usually careful to explain it.

Diving gives the town a second, international culture: instructors and crews from across the Philippines and abroad, boats leaving at dawn, and conversation about visibility, currents and wrecks. Ordinary social life runs on the same lines as anywhere in the country — basketball courts in each barangay, karaoke, the sari-sari store, evenings on the reclamation ground by the water. The question that runs through local life is how fast the town should grow, and who decides.

About 69,000 people live in the municipality, the figure the 2024 census gives, which covers a large part of Busuanga island and dozens of smaller islands, though the town proper holds only a fraction of them in a tight grid between the hill and the bay. Barangays spread up the slopes and along the coast roads, and outlying island communities depend entirely on boats.

Fishing remains the backbone outside tourism: Coron Bay and the surrounding waters supply fish for the town and for shipment to Manila, and seaweed farming and small-scale trade add to household income. Cattle graze the grassland of interior Busuanga, a legacy of the ranches established in the 20th century. Tourism now provides much of the cash work — boat crews, guides, dive staff, drivers, cooks and hotel workers — and is strongly seasonal, thinning out in the monsoon months.

Days start before dawn with boats and markets and slow through the heat. Water supply, waste disposal and electricity are recurring problems in a town growing faster than its infrastructure, and the bay itself shows the strain in places. Recovery from Typhoon Rai, locally called Odette, which crossed Palawan in December 2021, is within recent memory, and storm preparation is part of ordinary life here.

Coron eats from the sea. Fish, squid, prawns, crab and shellfish come off the boats and are grilled over charcoal, fried, or simmered in sinigang, the sour tamarind soup. Inihaw na isda, whole grilled fish with calamansi and a soy-and-vinegar dip, is the standard plate, and kinilaw cures raw fish in vinegar and calamansi with onion, ginger and chilli. Seaweed is eaten fresh in salads with tomato and onion, and dried fish is a breakfast staple with rice and eggs.

Palawan specialities appear alongside the national dishes. Tamilok, the mangrove shipworm eaten raw with vinegar, is offered to visitors as a local dare; cashews from the province are sold roasted and in sweets. Adobo, meat braised in vinegar, soy and garlic, and pancit noodles are as common here as anywhere in the country, and a Calamian kitchen usually has coconut in it somewhere.

The town centre has grown a visitor food scene of its own — bakeries, cafés with espresso, pizza and Asian dishes cooked for divers — but the cheapest and most local eating is still the market and the carinderias around it, where rice comes with whatever is in the trays. Halo-halo, shaved ice with milk, beans, jelly and fruit, is the afternoon standby; buko, young coconut, is sold at roadside stalls, and San Miguel beer is drunk on the waterfront at sunset.