ONE of the highlights of our media coverage of the 2020 Bambanti Festival was our Discover Isabela Tour, which took us to some of the province’s heritage churches (the province has five), as well as an upcoming tourism leisure site. Our tour first brought us to the town of Benito Soliven, just a 33-kilometer or one-hour drive away via the Pan-Philippine Highway.
Our destination here was the Benito Soliven View Deck and Flower Park, a recreation area ideal for a mini-stroll or pictorial session, whose focal point is a partial wheel-shaped Flower Park. Its awesome rustic view of mountains, rice fields and the Pinakawan River can be enjoyed from a concrete view deck, a wickerwork ring chair, and wooden platform, with wooden benches and a heart-shaped wickerwork backdrop, great backdrops for your Instagram feed; or from the Sky Cycle (Zip Bike), a “rush” which takes biking to another level.
A further 90-km (two-hour) drive brought us to the town of Tumauini and its Church of Saint Matthias, the best-preserved church complex in Isabela. Known for its brick, ecclesiastical ultra-Baroque style architecture, it is considered to be the best and most artistic brick structure in the country. A National Historical Landmark (February 24, 1989) and listed by the National Museum as a National Cultural Treasure, the church has also been considered for the Unesco World Heritage Tentative List under the collective group of Baroque Churches of the Philippines (Extension).
Its faҫade, with its circular pediment that is uniquely relative to all other churches built during the Spanish era, has serpentine reliefs and many finely molded details: flowers, foliage, wheels, ovules, hearts, sunbursts, squares and circles, oblongs and rectangles, curlicues; three long garlands, vegetal forms, clam shells.
The adjoining unique, four-story cylindrical bell tower, built in 1805, is the only known Spanish colonial era cylindrical tower in the country.
After lunch at the town’s municipal hall, a further 36-km (50-minute) drive finally brought us to San Pablo and its San Pablo de Cabigan Church Ruins. This church, the oldest in the province, was built using adobe instead of red bricks, setting it apart from most of the Spanish colonial era churches of the Cagayan Valley.
Damaged by Japanese bombing in World War II, the strong December 27, 1949, intensity 7 earthquake further damaged it and, three years later, a fire destroyed the church’s roof. Within the ruins, a smaller church, a third of the original structure, was built in the 1950s. The rest is a garden. Gorgeous clay insets of rosettes and sun emblems decorate the elegant walls. Its six-story square bell tower is the tallest in the Cagayan Valley.
A lull in the festival proceedings, we also made a visit to the Ilagan Japanese Tunnel, just a short 6.5-km (15-minute) drive away from the provincial capitol. This man-made war tunnel, part of the Japanese military headquarters during the 1942 to 1945 Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II, was also a weapons storage facility for bombs, explosives, guns and ammunition. Captured Filipino guerrillas were also imprisoned and tortured here. A long flight of concrete steps, cut into the hillside, leads to a watchtower. At the top and bottom of the stairway are concrete Japanese gates (torii), and outside the tunnel is a garden with a Shinto shrine, bridge, wind chime (furin) and a koi pond.
After our visit to the Ilagan Japanese Tunnel, we made a stopover, for supplies, at a pretty Bonifacio Park in Ilagan City. Here, it brought me face to face with the pride of Isabela and Ilagan’s winning bid for Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest armchair, locally known as butaka, a chair with a long arm rest which is not used for the arms but for the legs. Christened as the “Butaka ni Goliath,” it measures 11.4 feet high, 20.8 ft. long, 9.7 ft. wide and weighs 2,368 kilograms. It was made from a total of 1,184.48 board ft. of seasoned, first-class narra with a seat made with 1,740 ft. of interwoven 1-inch diameter rattan. Last year, the the Guinness Book of World Records also awarded the Bambanti Festival for the largest gathering of people dressed and dancing as scarecrows.
About 23.4 kms. out of Cauayan City, on our way back to Manila, we also made a short stopover in Alicia to visit the beautiful and solid Our Lady of Atocha Church, the smallest (in terms of floor area) and the youngest (at 171 years) Spanish era church in the Cagayan Valley. This brick church, an example of what is called as the “Cagayan style” of Spanish churches, was officially declared by the Department of Tourism as a national religious tourist destination in the Philippines.