The year 2021 is a milestone year in the history of our country, it being the quincentenary of Christianity in the Philippines.
The year is even more significant for admirers of nationalist, writer and National Hero Jose Rizal as June 19th is his 160th birth anniversary and December 30th is the 125th anniversary of his execution. Rizal is so honored in the country that, aside from a province, there are seven towns (in Cagayan, Kalinga, Laguna, Nueva Ecija, Occidental Mindoro, Palawan and Zamboanga del Norte) named after him. That is, aside from the streets, universities, high schools, parks, a coliseum, monuments, stadium and shrines bearing his name.
On May 20, 2011, the Lakbay Jose Rizal Heritage Trail was launched to give people the chance to discover the National Hero by visiting important places in his life. There are 27 Rizal sites around the country and, as a celebration of his life and death, many have tried to retrace his footsteps by visiting almost all of these places, a journey that started from Manila south to Calamba City (Laguna) and Daet (Camarines Norte), and north to Malolos City (Bulacan) and, outside Luzon, to Dumaguete City in Negros Oriental, Cebu City and Iloilo City in the Visayas, and Dapitan City and Dipolog City in Zamboanga del Norte.
The most notable, of course, is the Rizal Monument, where his remains are interred, in the aptly named Rizal Park (formerly the Luneta). Nearby is his actual execution site. A number of equally important sites are also within nearby Intramuros such as the Site of Ateneo Municipal de Manila, where Rizal was a student, the San Ignacio Church Ruins, where he heard mass as a student of Ateneo de Manila, and the Rizal Shrine, where he was incarcerated prior to his execution. Then there’s Paco Park where Rizal’s remains were secretly interred right after his execution.
A two-hour drive from Manila is Malolos City in Bulacan where you can find the Bautista House, where Rizal and Marcelo H. del Pilar spoke to the 21 women of Malolos on June 27, 1892, and the Women of Malolos Marker, the site of the school of the Women of Malolos whom Rizal wrote to on February 22, 1899 from London.
At the opposite end of the compass is Laguna, definitely a Rizal country as he was born in Calamba. A stone’s throw from each other is the Rizal Shrine, the reconstructed house where he was born, and the Church of St. John the Baptist, where Rizal was baptized on June 2, 1861. In nearby Los Baños is the house where Paciano Rizal, Rizal’s older brother, lived.
An eight-hour drive further south, in Daet, Camarines Norte, is the site of the first and oldest monument erected in honor of Rizal (though he never set foot in the town) in the country antedating, by 14 years, the more famous one built in Luneta in 1912 and in the world. The monument, a 3-tiered, 20-ft., high stone pylon designed by Lt.-Col. Antonio Sanz, a soldier-artist and a revolutionary head of the local government, and Lt.-Col. Ildefonso Alegre on December 30, 1898 (just two years after Rizal’s death), is rather unique as it does not bear a sculpted image of Rizal, unlike other monuments today.
Onward to the Visayas, Rizal, on board the SS Espana, made stopovers at Negros Oriental, Cebu and Iloilo on the way back to Manila from his exile in Dapitan, Zamboanga del Norte. Rizal made a one day visit to Dumaguete City, meeting with Negros Governor Emilio Regal and his classmate Faustino Herrero Regidor on August 1, 1896. The next day, he visited Cebu City where he treated patients with eye ailments. Incidentally, the University of the Southern Philippines Foundation Museum has the largest collection of Rizal’s works outside Luzon. Two days later, on August 4, he made a half-day layover in Iloilo City where Rizal visited his friend, Raymundo Melliza, who brought him to the Gothic-Renaissance-style St. Anne’s Church in Molo. Here, Rizal prayed and also viewed its collection of Biblical paintings, mostly copies by Gustave Dore which are no longer extant.
The tail end of the journey would be in Dapitan City in Zamboanga del Norte where a little over four (1892-1896) years of Rizal’s 35 years on earth were spent in political exile in this town in Mindanao. Here, he bought a 10-hectare estate (from his share of a winning lottery ticket) where he built three houses, engaged in farming (planting a large number of fruit and coconut trees, hemp, coffee and cacao), collected botanical and zoological specimens, and established a hospital and a school for bright boys. He also created a relief map of Mindanao at Dapitan plaza and designed the altar for the church of Dipolog. Other Rizal pilgrimage sites in Dapitan include Santa Cruz Beach (where Rizal landed on July 17, 1892) and the site of the Casa Real (where Rizal lived there from July 17, 1892 to March 1893).
He also gathered 346 shells of 203 species, created sculptures from clay (Oyang Dapitana and Mother’s Revenge), embarked in the business of buying and selling abaca and copra, drained the marshes to get rid of malaria that was infesting Dapitan, built a waterworks system and wrote some of his poems, articles and scientific treatises, as well as letters to his family and friends. Today, it is a National Shrine housing a collection of five reconstructed houses of bamboo and nipa, originally built by José Rizal, as well as other auxiliary structures, all in their original location.
His exile was also not so lonely as, in 1895, he fell in love with the 18 year old Irishwoman Josephine Bracken, the adopted daughter of her blind American godfather George Taufer, one of Rizal’s patients. Rizal wrote the poem A Josefina for Josephine. Though not married, they lived together as husband and wife and had a son who born prematurely and died within hours of birth. An hour before Rizal’s scheduled execution in Bagumbayan, they were said to have been married in a religious ceremony.