Moalboal

Moalboal grew as an ordinary Cebuano coastal municipality, its people living from maize and coconuts inland and from fishing in the Tañon Strait. One explanation traces its name to the Cebuano word for the bubbling of a spring in the town proper. Like the rest of western Cebu it was organised under Spanish rule around a parish and a poblacion set slightly back from the sea, with fishing hamlets strung along the shore, and it remained obscure through the American period and the first decades after independence.

The change came from the water. Divers began arriving in the 1970s and 1980s, drawn by a reef wall that starts only a few metres offshore at the hamlet of Panagsama, and by the steep drop-offs around Pescador Island. Simple huts became dive shops, and Moalboal established itself early as one of Cebu's cheapest and longest-running places to learn. Typhoon Ruping, among the strongest storms to strike the country in decades, made landfall on Cebu in 1990 and caused heavy damage across the province; Panagsama rebuilt behind a seawall.

Since then the town has grown steadily rather than dramatically. The huge shoal of sardines in the shallows off Panagsama turned snorkelling into a draw in its own right, bringing visitors who never put on a tank, and the canyoneering routes opened in the river gorges of neighbouring Badian added a second reason to stay. Resorts spread north to White Beach in Saavedra, while the poblacion carried on as the market and transport town it had always been, and local government and dive operators have argued ever since about waste, moorings and pressure on the reef.

Moalboal is Cebuano in language and Catholic in rhythm, and the parish year sets much of the calendar: Sunday Mass, processions, the long Christmas season that begins months early, and Holy Week, when the town empties into churches and families return from Cebu City and abroad. The town fiesta, like those all over the province, means open houses, a band, basketball and food for anyone who calls in.

Two populations live side by side. One is the farming and fishing municipality of barangays inland and along the coast, where life runs on family obligation, remittances from relatives working overseas, and the barangay basketball court. The other is the small, long-established foreign and Manila-based diving community on the Panagsama strip, some of whom have run shops here for decades. The mix is old enough to be unremarkable, and many businesses are jointly run.

Diving has created its own local customs. Boat crews and guides are usually men from the coastal barangays who learned the reef before they learned the qualifications, and the code around the sardine shoal — no chasing, no touching, no fins near the coral — is enforced by the guides themselves as much as by rules. Music, karaoke and late conversation carry along the strip in the evening, while the poblacion goes quiet early. Visitors are expected to dress modestly away from the beach and to be gentle in manner; open irritation costs more here than it gains.

Nearly 38,000 people live in the municipality, most of them in barangays spread along the coast and up into the hills rather than in the small poblacion. Tourism now provides much of the cash income — dive shops, resorts, boats, tricycles, laundries, shops and construction — but farming and fishing continue beside it, and many households mix the two, with a son driving a tricycle and a father still going out in a bangka.

The day starts early. Boats return with the night's catch before dawn, the market in the poblacion is busiest by seven, and dive boats load at Panagsama in the morning light. The middle of the day is slow and hot; the strip fills again in the late afternoon, when swimmers go in to meet the sardines in softer light. Children in school uniforms fill the roads twice a day, and the evening belongs to basketball, sari-sari shops and television.

The pressures are those of a small place growing quickly. Water supply, drainage and rubbish collection lag behind the building of rooms; the reef and the shoal bring the money and are also what heavy use threatens; and the road between the highway and the beaches carries far more scooters than it was built for. Power cuts happen, storms cut the town off occasionally, and work in tourism is seasonal, which is why so many families still keep a plot of land or a boat.

Eating in Moalboal is Cebuano before it is anything else. Grilled fish, squid and chicken come with rice — often puso, rice boiled in a woven pouch of palm leaf, the standard companion to barbecue across Cebu. Kinilaw, raw fish cured in vinegar with ginger, chilli and onion, is made with whatever the morning boats bring in. Lechon, whole roast pig, is the food of fiestas and of any occasion large enough to justify it, and Cebu's version is well known across the country.

Everyday eating happens at carinderia counters in the poblacion, where a plate of rice with adobo, pork sinigang, or fish stewed in vinegar costs a fraction of what the beach charges. The market sells mangoes and bananas, coconuts for drinking, dried fish and the small catch of the day, and streets stalls outside it fry bananas and grill skewers in the late afternoon. Tuba, coconut wine tapped from the palms, is the old village drink, though beer is more common now.

The Panagsama strip reflects who has stayed there. Alongside Filipino grills and breakfast silog plates — garlic rice, egg and a cured meat — there are pizzas, pastas, curries and western breakfasts that have been on menus for years, a reminder of how long divers have been coming. Fruit shakes, calamansi juice and buko, fresh young coconut, are the drinks of the hot part of the day, and halo-halo, shaved ice with beans, fruit, jelly and purple ube yam, is the standard afternoon sweet.