El Nido

The name comes from the Spanish for "the nest": the cliffs and caves around the bay hold the nests of swiftlets, built from hardened saliva and collected for the Chinese soup trade, a dangerous business carried out on bamboo scaffolds high on the limestone. The settlement was known as Bacuit until 1954, when it was renamed El Nido. People had lived in this corner of Palawan for far longer than either name suggests: the rock shelter at Ille Cave in the Dewil Valley, a short way inland, has yielded burials and remains going back thousands of years, among the important prehistoric sites of the Philippines.

For most of the 20th century El Nido was a remote fishing municipality at the end of a bad road, its economy built on fish, coconut and the nest trade. Diving and small-scale tourism began in the last decades of the 20th century, when island resorts opened in the bay and word of the lagoons spread among divers. The waters were given protected status in 1984 and the designation was widened in 1998, so that the El Nido-Taytay Managed Resource Protected Area, covering Bacuit Bay, the mainland and part of the neighbouring municipality, became the framework within which tourism has grown.

Growth came fast after 2010, as the road from Puerto Princesa improved, low-cost flights reached Palawan, and the airport at Lio opened the town to direct arrivals. Guesthouses, tour offices and bars filled the Poblacion; visitor numbers rose steeply. With them came the problems of a small town taking in far more people than it was built for — waste, water supply, sewage reaching the bay, and building on land not meant for it. Managing that growth inside a protected area has become the municipality's central problem.

El Nido's population is a mix, and that is the point about its culture. Alongside families long established on this coast are migrants from the Visayas and Luzon who came for work in fishing and later in tourism, and Palawan's Indigenous communities live in the municipality's interior and outer barangays. Tagalog and English are heard everywhere in town, Cuyonon and other Palawan languages at home; the result is a place that feels less rooted in one tradition than most Philippine towns.

Catholicism sets the calendar, as it does across the country. The parish church stands a street back from the beach, Holy Week empties the offices and fills the boats with Filipino visitors, and the town fiesta and Christmas bring home relatives working in Manila or abroad. Basketball courts, karaoke and the evening sari-sari store are the ordinary social life behind the bars of the main street.

The other culture here is the visitor economy: boat crews, guides, divers, tour sellers, cooks and drivers, many of them seasonal, with an international layer of dive instructors and resort staff. It has brought money and English and a certain worldliness, and also a sharp local debate about how much more the bay can take. Conservation is a live local issue rather than a slogan: the town and its bay sit inside a protected area, and how much building and boat traffic the coast can take is argued over here as much as anywhere.

About 51,000 people live in the municipality, which is the figure the 2024 census gives, spread over more than a dozen barangays, with only a fraction of them in the crowded Poblacion; the rest live in fishing and farming settlements along the coast and inland, and on the islands of the bay. The town centre is dense, low-rise and busy, and building has spread along the coast road in both directions.

Fishing and coconut farming still support many households, and much of the fish eaten and sold in town comes off local boats, but tourism now dominates the cash economy. Work is seasonal in a way that shapes the year: the dry months bring long days for boat crews, guides and hotel staff, and the monsoon brings repairs, quieter streets and a return to fishing. Prices for rent, food and fuel are higher than in most of Palawan because nearly everything arrives by road or boat.

The strains of fast growth are the town's daily subject. Water supply, rubbish collection, sewage treatment, the power supply and the state of the roads all lag behind the number of people, and the reef and the bay bear the consequences. Residents are also aware how exposed the town is to a bad season — a storm, a ferry accident, a drop in visitors — after the long closure of travel earlier in the decade.

Seafood is the foundation. Fish, squid, prawns and crab come off the boats and go straight onto charcoal: inihaw na isda, whole grilled fish with calamansi, soy and chilli, is the everyday meal, with rice and a vegetable dish alongside. Kinilaw cures raw fish in vinegar or calamansi with onion, ginger and chilli, sometimes enriched with coconut milk. Sinigang, a sour tamarind broth, and adobo, meat braised in vinegar, soy and garlic, are on nearly every menu, as they are across the country.

Palawan has its own curiosities. Tamilok, the shipworm taken from rotting mangrove wood and eaten raw with vinegar, is the one visitors are dared into; crocodile meat and cashew products are sold as souvenirs from Puerto Princesa. Coconut appears in the cooking of the coastal towns, and seaweed salad with tomato and onion is common on the coast.

In town itself the food is deliberately international: pizza, burgers, Thai and Indian dishes, smoothie bowls and espresso sit beside Filipino grills along the main streets, and bakeries sell pandesal in the morning. The cheapest and most local eating is at the market and the carinderias behind it, where rice comes with whatever has been stewed that day. Halo-halo, shaved ice with milk, beans and fruit, is the standard afternoon relief from the heat, and the local drinks are San Miguel beer, fresh calamansi juice and buko, young coconut, cut open at a roadside stall.