Siquijor

Siquijor was called Isla del Fuego, the island of fire, by the Spanish who charted it in the 16th century, a name usually explained by the glow of swarms of fireflies in its molave trees seen from the sea. The island is young in geological terms, lifted out of the water as coral limestone, and fossil coral still shows in its hills and in the stone of its buildings. Its people were fishermen and farmers living in scattered coastal settlements long before Spanish administration reached them.

Missionaries came in force in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the population was gathered into towns around large churches built of coral blocks cut from the island itself. Lazi's church and its enormous convent, Siquijor town's church of Saint Francis of Assisi and the hilltop church at Maria date from that period, and their belfries served as lookouts against raiding from the southern seas. Administratively the island was attached first to Bohol and from 1892 to Negros Oriental, whose sub-province it became in 1901, governed from across the water.

It became a separate province in 1971, the third smallest in the country by both land area and population, and remained among the least developed, losing many of its young people to work in Cebu, Manila and overseas. Tourism arrived late and gently: resorts spread along the San Juan coast in recent decades, and the island's reputation for magic, which had kept some Filipinos away, became part of what drew others. In June 2024 Siquijor was moved out of Central Visayas and grouped with the two Negros provinces into a re-established Negros Island Region. Electricity, water and road improvements have followed the visitors, and the island's small scale still limits how far any of it can go.

Siquijor's name carries weight across the Philippines. The island is associated with mananambal, folk healers who mix herbal medicine, massage, prayer and ritual, and with the darker figure of the mambabarang, who is said to be able to send harm. Filipinos from other islands arrive to be treated for illnesses that hospitals have not resolved, and the strongest concentration of activity falls in Holy Week, when healers gather in the uplands to prepare their remedies. Islanders themselves are matter-of-fact about it: the healers are neighbours, most are devout Catholics, and the tourist version of the story is far more lurid than the practice.

Beneath that reputation is an ordinary, conservative Visayan culture. Cebuano is spoken, the church calendar organises the year, and town fiestas for patron saints bring bands, basketball tournaments, beauty contests and open houses. Families are close and often scattered, with relatives working in Cebu, Manila or abroad and returning for Christmas and Holy Week, which are the busiest weeks of the year.

People here are famously quiet and polite, even by Philippine standards, and directness reads as rudeness. Greetings, a slow pace and patience get further than insistence. Music and karaoke carry from houses in the evening, cockfighting remains a village institution, and the paved ring road has become the island's social spine, with children, dogs, chickens and tricycles sharing it with rented scooters.

Around 108,000 people live in the province, spread across its six municipalities, none of them large; Siquijor town, the capital, and Larena are the main ports, and most people live in coastal barangays. Farming, fishing and remittances from relatives working away carry most households, with coconut, maize, root crops and small livestock in the interior. Tourism has become the visible earner on the west coast, supporting resorts, restaurants, scooter hire, boats and guiding work.

The rhythm is rural. Boats go out at night and unload before dawn, the markets are busiest early, and the hottest hours are for rest and shade. Schoolchildren fill the ring road in the morning and again in the afternoon, and in the evening the courts and the sari-sari shops become the centre of village life. Sundays belong to Mass and to family meals.

Small-island constraints shape everything. Water supply is limited in the dry months, power cuts are routine, medical care beyond the provincial hospital means a ferry to Dumaguete, and the ferry itself is the lifeline for goods, fuel and students. Young people leave for work in Cebu, Manila and overseas and send money home, and the local debate about tourism turns on how much building the coast can absorb before the quiet that draws people disappears.

Siquijor eats what the sea and small farms provide. Grilled and fried fish, squid and shellfish come with rice, and kinilaw — raw fish cured in vinegar with ginger, onion and chilli — is made wherever the catch is fresh. Chicken and pork are stewed in adobo, soured into sinigang, or grilled over coals on skewers with puso, rice boiled in woven palm-leaf pouches, as it is across Cebuano-speaking islands. Lechon, whole roast pig, marks a fiesta or a family celebration.

Coconut runs through everything: in stews with fish and vegetables, in cakes and sweets, and as the drink of the hot part of the day, cut fresh at the roadside. Tuba, coconut wine tapped from the palm and often reddened with mangrove bark, is the old village drink, sold by the litre in village shops and taken at the end of the working day. Root crops such as cassava and sweet potato, and locally grown bananas and mangoes, fill out the market stalls.

The bakeries are a local habit worth noticing: small shops in Larena, Siquijor town and Lazi turn out pan de sal in the morning and sweet breads through the day, and budbud, sticky rice steamed in banana leaf, is sold alongside them. On the San Juan beach strip the cooking shifts towards what visitors want — pizza, breakfasts, shakes and coffee — while the carinderia counters in the towns keep to rice meals and whatever was caught or slaughtered that morning.