Puerto Princesa

Puerto Princesa was founded on 4 March 1872 as a Spanish settlement on a deep, sheltered bay chosen as a naval and administrative base for a province Spain had never really controlled. The name honoured a Spanish princess — most accounts point to Infanta Eulalia, a daughter of Queen Isabella II — and within months the bay had become the centre of Spanish naval operations in the province. Taytay, further north, remained the capital until the American period. Puerto Princesa stayed small and malarial for decades, a garrison and a port on the edge of the empire.

American rule after 1898 brought the institutions that still shape the city's edges — above all the Iwahig Penal Colony, authorised in November 1904 a short way south-west, where prisoners farmed instead of being confined in cells. The Second World War brought the city its darkest episode: on 14 December 1944, as American forces approached, Japanese troops killed 139 of the American prisoners of war held in the city; eleven escaped. A memorial in Plaza Cuartel marks the massacre. The town was also bombed heavily, and little of the Spanish-era fabric survived.

Post-war Puerto Princesa grew as Palawan's administrative centre and as the destination for migrants from the Visayas and Luzon moving to a province with land to spare; Vietnamese refugees settled in the province in the same decades, leaving a culinary mark that remains. It became a chartered city in 1970 and was later reorganised with an enormous municipal area reaching from coast to coast. From the 1990s the city built a reputation for environmental policy — tree planting, bans and clean-up campaigns — and the inscription of the subterranean river as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999 made tourism the driver of its growth.

Puerto Princesa is a city of arrivals. Its population came from across the Philippines — Ilonggo, Cebuano, Tagalog and Ilocano speakers, alongside Cuyonon families from the Cuyo islands who were among the earliest settlers, and Palawan's Indigenous peoples, the Tagbanwa, Palaw'an and Batak, who live mostly in the province's interior and southern uplands. Tagalog and English are the common languages of the city, with Cuyonon and Visayan spoken at home. The mixture gives the place a mild, unhurried character without the strong regional identity of older Philippine cities.

Catholicism provides the public calendar, from the cathedral's feast of the Immaculate Conception in December to Holy Week processions, and provincial anniversaries fill the capital with delegations from Palawan's municipalities. Evenings belong to the baywalk, where families, students and food stalls fill the promenade after the heat has gone.

The city takes its environmental reputation seriously and publicly: rules on wildlife products and waste are visible in signs and enforcement, and residents are proud of the city's environmental reputation. Vietnamese noodle soup, sold as chao long, has become a local speciality through the refugee settlement in the province, one of the clearest examples of how recent the city's traditions are and how readily it absorbs them.

About 316,000 people live in Puerto Princesa, the figure the 2024 census gives, in a city whose boundaries take in farmland, forest and two coastlines as well as the built-up area around the bay; by land area it is the second largest city in the Philippines after Davao, and thinly settled over most of it. About three-quarters of the population lives in the city proper on the shores of the bay. Most residents live in the barangays along the main road and the bay, in low buildings of concrete and iron sheet.

Government, tourism and trade drive the economy. Provincial and city offices, the courts, schools and the island's main hospitals are here; hotels, tour operators, vans and boats employ thousands, and the airport is the hinge of the whole province's travel. Fishing supplies the markets, and farming — rice, cashew, coconut, fruit — continues in the outer barangays, alongside the penal farm at Iwahig.

Days begin early and traffic builds on Rizal Avenue through the morning; afternoons are hot and slow; evenings fill the baywalk and the barbecue stalls. Power and water supply, waste disposal and the state of the roads are constant local complaints, and growth pressures — land prices, building on the shoreline, and the strain that visitor numbers put on the parks — are argued over in a city that has staked its reputation on conservation.

Seafood is the everyday food. Fish, squid, prawns and crab from the bay and Honda Bay are grilled over charcoal as inihaw, served with rice, calamansi and a soy-and-vinegar dip; sinigang, the sour tamarind broth, and kinilaw, raw fish cured in vinegar and calamansi with ginger and chilli, are on most menus. Dried fish with rice and eggs is a standard breakfast.

The city's distinctive dish came with the Vietnamese refugees who settled in Palawan. Chao long, the local name for beef noodle soup, is eaten with crusty bread across the city and has become as much a Puerto Princesa habit as anything older. Palawan also offers the things visitors are urged to try once — tamilok, the mangrove shipworm eaten raw with vinegar, and crocodile meat from the wildlife centre's stock — alongside honey gathered in the forests.

Cashews are the province's signature product, roasted, candied and baked into tarts and sold in every market and souvenir shop; the market also stacks dried fish, seaweed, and fruit from the outer barangays. National staples fill the rest of the table: adobo, pancit noodles, lechon at celebrations, pandesal from the bakeries in the morning, and halo-halo, shaved ice with milk, beans, jelly and fruit, in the afternoon heat. Beer, calamansi juice and buko, young coconut, are the usual drinks.