Cebu Part 2: Seeing the Sights

The first thing you need to know about the sights in Cebu city is that, officially, there aren’t many. The second thing you need to know is that this doesn’t matter in the slightest, because just by walking down the streets you will see sights far more interesting than any historical monument or tourist trap. Nevertheless, a couple of things are worth visiting.

We started our sightseeing trip with the cathedral. Apart from a few ugly statues, I quite liked the architechture and the interior because I'm a sucker for light airy buildings with lots of gold, but more interesting was the schedule of masses outside. Colonised by the Spanish from 1571 to 1898, the Philippines is overwhelmingly a Catholic country, and the evidence is everywhere.

Our local parish church in Cebu attracted up to 20 000 worshippers on a given Sunday, so the pressure on the cathedral must be immense. We had a little chuckle at the idea of weddings being carried out on a “first come, first served” basis but presumably this does mean when you book in advance!

The man in the picture is about to become only the second-ever saint from the Philippines and his beatification is clearly a very exciting event. I love the lack of cynicism revealed by "with more priests" being touted as a unique selling point.

After the cathedral, we went to Magellan’s cross. It was Magellan who brought Catholicism to the Philippines and he seems to have done an excellent job of implanting it in the culture before being killed by a tribal chief after he invaded Mactan island in 1521. The cross you can see in Cebu supposedly contains fragments of the original cross that Magellan planted when he arrived in the Philippines.

The final stop on our tour was the Basilica del Santo Niño. The Santo Niño is a statue of the boy Jesus dressed as a Spanish prince, and was presented by Magellan to Queen Juana, wife of the Rajah of Cebu after her conversion to Catholicism. While not officially the patron saint of Cebu because it represents Jesus himself, the locals are devoted to it and queue up to pass in front of it and touch the bullet proof glass that protects it from attack.

Then, having done our duty to official tourist, we headed back out into the streets to experience some more of the endlessly changing sights of everyday existence in Cebu.