Vigan

Vigan grew where the Abra river system meets the sea, on what was once an island in the delta, and was already a trading settlement handling Chinese goods before Spain arrived. In 1572 Juan de Salcedo took the area and founded the Villa Fernandina, which became the Spanish capital of the north and, from the 18th century, the seat of the diocese of Nueva Segovia. Chinese and Chinese mestizo merchants shipped indigo, tobacco and abaca out and brought silk and porcelain in, and their profits built the two-storey stone-and-timber houses that still line the old streets.

The town was a centre of revolt as well as trade. Diego Silang led an uprising in 1762–63 while the British held Manila; after his assassination his widow Gabriela Silang continued the fight and was executed in Vigan's plaza in 1763. The Basi Revolt of 1807 broke out over the Spanish monopoly on sugarcane wine, and José Burgos, one of the three priests executed in 1872 in a case that galvanised Filipino nationalism, was born in a house near the cathedral.

Vigan escaped the wartime destruction that levelled so many Philippine towns, which is why the mestizo quarter survives at all. Decades of neglect followed, and by the 1980s many houses were decaying. Conservation rules, the return of cobbles and the removal of overhead wires brought the quarter back, and in 1999 UNESCO inscribed the historic town on the World Heritage List as the best surviving example of a planned Spanish colonial town in Asia. Vigan became a city in 2001, and in December 2014 was named one of the New7Wonders Cities, officially recognised as such the following May. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake in July 2022 damaged the cathedral, its bell tower and a number of the old houses.

The city's identity is Ilocano and mestizo at once. Its merchant families were Chinese in origin and Catholic in practice, and the architecture records the mixture: sliding capiz-shell windows, wide wooden upper floors built to catch the sea breeze, thick lime-and-brick lower walls built to survive earthquakes, and Chinese-style courtyards behind. Many of the houses are still owned by descendants of the families who built them, and the rules that govern repairs, paint and signage are a constant local conversation.

Catholic practice sets the calendar. Holy Week processions carry images on carriages through the old streets, the January city fiesta fills the plazas, and the cathedral, the archbishop's palace and the seminary give Vigan a clerical weight unusual for a place of its size. The May Binatbatan festival celebrates the crafts — cotton beating, weaving on wooden looms, and the burnay pottery that has been made here for centuries using clay trodden by carabao and fired in long wood kilns.

Ilocano reserve and thrift are worn with some pride, and so is the region's political history: Vigan's leading families have supplied governors and congressmen for generations, and President Elpidio Quirino grew up in the town. Evenings are sociable and public — the plazas fill after dark, the fountain show draws families, and the cobbled street becomes a promenade once the traffic is shut out.

About 54,000 people live in the city, which functions as the capital of Ilocos Sur and the market and administrative centre for a string of coastal towns. The provincial government, schools, universities and the church are major employers, and tourism supports the old quarter's hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops and kalesa drivers. Outside the centre most households farm, fish or work in trade.

The working day starts early, as it does across the Ilocos. The market is busiest before eight; offices and schools run through the morning heat; the potteries in Pagburnayan work through the day; and the afternoon slows before the plazas refill at dusk. Tricycles are the basic transport, and their noise is the background sound of the residential streets.

Living inside a World Heritage Site is a mixed inheritance. Owners of the old houses face strict conservation rules and expensive repairs, weekend crowds press through streets where people live, and the city has had to manage parking, waste and the balance between souvenir shops and ordinary trade. Many young Viganeños still leave for Manila or overseas work, and remittances are an important part of household income here as across the north.

Vigan's cooking is Ilocano, salty and sour and thrifty, with one or two specialities that people travel for. Vigan longganisa is the best known: a short garlicky pork sausage made with sugarcane vinegar, fried until the edges crisp and eaten with garlic rice and a fried egg. Bagnet is the other great local meat — pork belly boiled, dried and deep-fried twice so the skin blisters into crackling — usually served with tomatoes, onions and bagoong, the fermented fish paste that seasons much of the region's food.

The Vigan empanada is a street food with its own ritual: rice-flour pastry coloured orange with achuete, stuffed with grated green papaya, crumbled longganisa and an egg, folded and deep-fried to order at the stalls around Plaza Burgos, then dipped in sukang Iloko, the local sugarcane vinegar. Vegetable dishes follow Ilocano lines: pinakbet with squash, okra, eggplant and bitter melon under bagoong; dinengdeng, a lighter broth; poqui-poqui, grilled eggplant scrambled with egg.

Sinanglaw, a sour soup of beef innards flavoured with bile and ginger, is a market breakfast, and royal bibingka — a small, dense cassava cake topped with cheese — is the sweet most often carried home, alongside sukang Iloko, chichacorn toasted corn snacks and jars of bagoong. Basi, wine fermented from sugarcane and the cause of the 1807 revolt, is still made in the province and sold in bottles and burnay jars.