Donsol

Donsol was a coastal settlement of fishing and farming families long before it drew any attention from outside. It became a municipality of Sorsogon province in the Spanish period, with the parish church and the plaza at its centre in the pattern used across the colonial Philippines, and its people lived on the sea, on coconut and on rice, as they largely still do. The name is generally explained as coming from a local plant, and the town's history through the 19th and 20th centuries is the ordinary history of a Bicol coastal municipality: typhoons, harvests, migration and the slow arrival of roads.

What changed everything was an animal that had always been there. For more than a century local people believed the butanding, the whale shark, to be dangerous. That changed in December 1997, when a diving instructor, Romir Aglugub, and his group swam with them and found them harmless, and by 1998 the sharks had become the emblem of Donsol, which took the title "Whale Shark Capital of the World". The animals gather in the plankton-rich water off the coast between November and June, with numbers peaking from February to May.

Rather than allow the sharks to be fished or the encounters to go unregulated, the municipality and conservation groups built an organised system around them: interaction is regulated through the local tourism office, boats are registered, visitors are briefed before going out, and WWF guidelines on how close swimmers may come are generally observed. Time magazine named the Donsol encounter the best animal encounter in Asia in 2004, and the income reshaped a town that had almost none before. Tourism now sits alongside fishing and farming rather than replacing them.

Donsol is Bicolano and thoroughly Catholic. The parish church and the fiesta calendar organise the year, and the regional devotion to Our Lady of Peñafrancia, whose September procession fills Naga a few hours to the north, is felt here too. Baptisms, weddings and town fiestas are large family occasions, and the extended family — grandparents, cousins, godparents — is the unit that matters most, as it is across the region.

Bikol languages are spoken at home, Tagalog is universal and English is taught in school and used with visitors, so the town's guides and boat crews work easily in three languages. Manners are the Filipino ones: indirectness in disagreement, respect for elders marked in speech, and a strong reluctance to embarrass anyone in public. Karaoke is a fixture of celebrations, and basketball courts stand in almost every barangay.

The whale shark has become part of the town's identity rather than simply a source of income. The butanding appears on signs and murals around the town, and the interaction rules are a matter of local pride and local enforcement, with boat crews trained to keep swimmers back from the animals. Alongside them, the evening trips to watch fireflies in the mangroves along the river have given the town a second, quieter attraction. The fishing calendar, the harvests of coconut and rice, and the storm season shape the rhythm of the year as much as any of this.

The municipality had about 51,800 residents at the 2024 census, spread over 51 barangays rather than concentrated in one town. The Poblacion holds the municipal offices, the market, the schools and the church; the rest of the population lives along the coast or inland among coconut groves and rice fields, in houses of concrete block, timber and iron sheet.

Fishing and farming remain the base of the economy. Boats go out for the day's catch, copra is dried from coconut, rice is grown on the flat land behind the shore, and pili nuts and vegetables come in from the uplands. Tourism adds work for boat crews, spotters, guides, resort staff, tricycle drivers and cooks, but it is seasonal by nature and stops when the sharks and the good weather go. As in most of Bicol, many families also depend on money sent home by relatives working in Manila or abroad.

Days start early, with boats leaving before dawn and children walking to school in uniform; afternoons are hot and slow; evenings are spent outside, on basketball courts, at sari-sari stores and in front of televisions. The persistent local issues are the ones common to the region — storm damage to houses and crops, the cost of rebuilding, patchy roads and water supply, and the balance between protecting the whale sharks and the pressure to grow the business around them.

Donsol eats Bicolano, which means coconut milk and chilli in almost everything. Gata, coconut milk, thickens the stews; sili, chilli, is used more freely here than anywhere else in the country. Laing is dried taro leaves simmered slowly in coconut milk with chilli, shrimp paste and often pork; pinangat wraps fish or minced shrimp in taro leaves and cooks the parcels the same way. Bicol Express, pork stewed in coconut milk with a great quantity of chilli, is cooked in the Bicolano style and eaten nationwide.

The sea supplies the rest. Fish is grilled over coals, fried, or cooked into sinigang, a sour broth soured with tamarind or local fruit. Kinilaw cures raw fish in vinegar and calamansi with onion, ginger and chilli, and kinunot flakes fish into coconut milk with chilli and malunggay leaves. Squid, crab and shellfish come off the same boats that carry visitors out in the season.

Rice accompanies everything, and the day is punctuated by merienda, the mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack: boiled bananas, rice cakes, pancit noodles or bread with sweetened coffee. Pili nuts, grown mainly in Bicol, are roasted, candied and baked into tarts sold in the market and along the roads. Tuba, fermented coconut sap, is the traditional village drink, though bottled beer and instant coffee are more common. Sweets lean on coconut and sticky rice — suman, bibingka and biko among them.