Meet the Philippines' Islanders Reclaiming Their Heritage in the Visayas Islands

The Hiligaynon language of the central Philippines is filled with mouthwatering onomatopoeia. There’s lagting (scraping and tapping cutlery), tamsak (smacking lips) and harakhak (cackling laughter). But the word that comes to mind as I tuck in to a brioche bun filled with ginamos, a pungent paste made from fish or shrimps, is mananam (umami). It’s based on the sound one makes when eating something delicious, and spills out as soon as I finish my meal — to the delight of Ramon ‘Chinchin’ Uy Jr, owner of organic restaurant Lanai by Fresh Start.

We’re in the city of Bacolod on Negros island, my launchpad for exploring the area to see how locals like Chinchin are preserving and promoting its culture. Though best known for the white-sand resort of Boracay, the central Philippines encompasses hundreds of islands, including Negros and the Western Visayas. A great number of these outposts are home to the Hiligaynon people: the biggest ethnolinguistic group in Bacolod, united by a shared language, food and culture. Nowhere is that clearer than sat at Chinchin’s long, communal table, where lagting, tamsak and harakhak form the backing track to our conversation.

Chinchin is wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the red snail logo of the Slow Food movement. Broad-shouldered and straight-backed, he radiates vitality — living testament to the quality of his ingredients. He hands me a cocktail made from gin and batwan, a sour, marble-sized green fruit native to this region. “If batwan disappears, our culture will disappear,” he says. “We don’t want to use truffles or caviar; we want to maximise the potential of our own ingredients.” Ninety-eight per cent of what’s served at Lanai is either grown on Chinchin’s farm or is hyper-local to the island.

The region’s produce is just one aspect of its cultural heritage, which, historically, has been overlooked. It’s a legacy of Manila-centric colonial policies and the 1937 elevation of Manila’s language, Tagalog, to the Philippines’ official language, along with English. Joining us at the table are Jason and Virna Tan, a charismatic husband-and-wife duo in their fifties who will be my guides for the week and who have witnessed the consequences of this bias. “School subjects are taught in Tagalog, which is a bit weird because nobody here speaks it,” says Jason, adjusting his square-rimmed glasses. “And they only teach national history, not local history. It’s sad.”

But there are signs of a cultural resurgence. Iloilo, on Panay island, became the Philippines’ first Unesco Creative City of Gastronomy in 2023. New music, art and museums, such as Iloilo’s National Museum Western Visayas, celebrate the culture. And in 2025, Bacolod was selected to host the first Terra Madre Asia and Pacific — an event with its origins in Italy’s Slow Food Movement, which aims to preserve traditional foods. Chinchin co-founded Slow Food Negros in 2012 and was instrumental in securing this honour.

On the night of our dinner, the event — comprising five days of pop-ups, talks and tastings — has just finished. Many chefs have stuck around to forage in the provinces or explore the markets, intrigued by the area’s reputation as a place of heritage ingredients and deep-rooted traditions.

Searching For Sugarlandia

The next day, Jason and Virna take me to Bacolod Central Market. Along the way, we pass honking jeepneys (public buses originally converted from military jeeps), canary-yellow tricycles and a jumble of buildings that recall the Philippines’ former colonists: Spanish-style arches, US-style clapboard. Murals of grinning, feather-framed masks evoke Masskara, the city’s biggest festival.

The market is a sprawl of stalls under a corrugated iron roof, where sellers call out in the sing-song tone of Hiligaynon. Uga (dried fish), batwan and ginamos assail my nostrils, but what’s most surprising is the abundance of sweet snacks. There’s budbud, baye-baye, kalamay hati, suman latik: all variations on sticky rice with brown sugar.

Since the Spanish era, sugar has shaped Western Visayas and its neighbouring islands, where Filipinos worked in appalling conditions on the estates. Negros, which was — and still is — the centre of the industry, acquired the nickname ‘Sugarlandia’. Virna tells me that Negrenses are redefining this “crop of oppression”, converting haciendas into agritourism sites and opening their ancestors’ sugar mansions to visitors.

In the afternoon, we drive north to reach one such enterprise. The buildings thin out until the car windows frame only banana trees, their leaves slick with humidity, then field after field of tall, pale-green sugarcane. Workers sit astride lumbering carabao buffaloes or stand atop lorries, using machetes to hack the canes into transportable pieces.

After about 20 minutes, we reach The Ruins: the gutted remains of an early 20th-century, American-era mansion, now a favourite sunset hangout with a gift shop and restaurant. Young groups of friends in sleek shirts and dresses wander palm-shaded gardens lined with glowing yellow lanterns, stopping to pose for photos under Italianate arches.

It’s not just the architecture that draws people here, it’s the story. In 1911, Maria Braganza died after a miscarriage; her heartbroken husband, the haciendero (plantation owner) Don Mariano Lacson, built the mansion on his sugar plantation in her memory. During the Second World War, however, Filipino guerrillas burned the building down to prevent Japanese invaders from using it.

While sipping a lemonade at the restaurant, I meet Don Mariano’s great-grandson Raymund Javellana, who took over the neglected estate in 2005. “The canes were so tall, you couldn’t even see the fountain,” he says, his eyes sparkling with humour.

Raymund hired a landscaper to clean up the garden, then told his friends about his plans to make it a visitor attraction. “‘Nobody’s going to come here,’ they said. Deep inside, I thought: ‘I’m going to prove you wrong,’” he tells me, before revealing that many homes are still used by the descendants of those who built them. “We’re very proud of what our ancestors left us,” he says.

The next day, I come across another, more intact home in the municipality of Manapla, on Negros’s northwest coast. Set within sugar plantations and manicured gardens, the Gaston Ancestral House is a living museum wrapped in balustrades, its entire facade painted creamy white. A light breeze breathes the scent of pine into the rooms, gently ruffling the silver hair of Joey Gaston. With granular attention to detail, he guides me through the home his haciendero grandfather, Jose ‘Panggoy’ Gaston, built in the 1930s.

I step across native balayong wood floors, admire chairs backed with rattan woven using the Filipino solihiya technique and peer into display cabinets crammed with silver and carved with pineapple motifs. At the balcony, Joey encourages me to take off my sandals and stand on the cool tiles, as he tells me about his passion for keeping the building alive.

Black Sheep

From the splashy murals of Bacolod to the beautifully preserved mansions of the wider province, the Negrenses’ keen sense of aesthetics is undeniable, and my guide Jason has a theory why. “The conservative families of Iloilo sent their black sheep sons — their gamblers and their drunkards — to plant sugarcane here and become rich,” he says. “But the ones with vices are also the artistic ones.”

The next day, Jason takes me to visit a project that shows what he means. Ten miles south of Bacolod, on the edge of Bago City, we pull up at a row of low, iron-roofed buildings. Here is Tumandok Crafts Industries, a workshop and store. Owner Josephine Locsin shows me around; scattered coconut husks and scraps of Indigenous T’nalak woven cloth indicate the workers have just downed tools for lunch.

Initially Josephine sold products by Negros artisans but, when the local sugar mill closed in the 1990s, she established a factory to provide employment for its former workers. “They have beautiful stories,” she says, gathering her long, glossy hair over one shoulder. “Some were addicts before, some were drunkards, but now they’ve let go of that. My dream was for them to have their own businesses — several of them have done that.”

Josephine realised that lamination — the application of polyester resin to coconut shells, to toughen them — could also be applied to Capiz shells, so she trained her new employees in this skill. Named after a province on Panay, Capiz windowpane  oysters are one of the region’s best-known exports, used for homewares and clothing worldwide. Laminated, they became yet more versatile. I see them inlaid into tables, clocks and frames, their shine illuminating palm tree and bamboo designs. Fragments are laid out so visitors can create their own jewellery using these pearlescent sea treasures.

Two hours’ drive north, Jason, Virna and I come to the coastal community of Purok Bougainvillea, in the city of Sagay, to explore a community tourism project by celebrated Sagay artist Nune Alvarado. We swap the car for a trisikad (pedicab) that’s painted with flower motifs and powered by young guide, Rhoda Hit. She wears a brown cap and a floral blouse as bright as the bougainvillea stem
she hands me.

Within moments, the grey concrete of Sagay gives way to a living gallery, where everything from the chapel to the convenience store is painted. This is Pinta Balay, Rhoda tells me over the creaking of trisikad wheels — an area where homeowners have eagerly offered up their properties for Nune to use as an urban canvas.

A key artist in the Philippines’ Social Realism movement, which began in the 1970s, Nune’s most harrowing works have drawn attention to the plight of Negros’s sugar workers. Here, though, his work is more abstract and bright. In sunrise oranges and hibiscus reds, his swirls and triangles seem to bobble like cockscombs or bristle like hedgehogs. Some are up to two storeys high.

Eventually, we emerge onto the black sands of Margaha, where a beachfront, bamboo-built cafe called Kape Albarako gleams with Nune’s signature blues, pinks and greens. It’s run by the artist’s wife Sally Alvarado. Though her husband now struggles with worsening dementia, Sally tells me she and the local government are campaigning to have him named an official National Artist of the Philippines. “Nune has always fought for the masses through his work,” says Sally, placing a tray of homemade pastries on the table with delicate hands. “He’s loved by his community; for me, that’s already an award.” However, she believes securing this designation would also win more funding for Sagay’s arts and community programmes and encourage more Negrenses to stay in the province rather than migrate to the capital, as so many do.

Loading The Ark

The next day, I meet Kiko Torno, one of few Filipinos to have moved in the other direction, away from Manila — at least, part-time. Some 17 miles north of Bacolod, we’re bumping along a rural track in Enrique B Magalona municipality. On either side, fishponds sweat under the hot sun, drooping coconut palms shimmer in the haze and dragonflies flash by.

Once a full-time ‘city boy’ working in advertising, Kiko now spends half of each month at sustainable aquaculture plot, 7 Hectares. He retains a home in Manila, so he can promote his produce through pop-ups and tastings.

“I was trying to get out of corporate life,” says Kiko, who, with his long silver hair and faded blue jeans, looks more like a rockstar than a marketing man. “I noticed that the quality of fish in Manila was declining; I wanted to spread awareness of the seafood quality in Negros.”

After taking an aquaculture course, Kiko and his Negrense wife, Gretchen, turned this abandoned tiger prawn farm into a sustainable marine farm cultivating several species, including barramundi and horn snails. “My main objective is to preserve the island’s native species,” he says.

Kiko’s enthusiasm for local produce is infused into the multi-course menus he and chef Gus Sibayan serve at 7 Hectares. When we meet later that day, Gus is stir-frying mangrove crabs and whipping up acidic batwan dressings under a palm-roof canopy. Every ingredient is sourced either from the farm or local communities, he tells me, before serving up an earthy-tasting soup. It’s a Western Visayan vegetable dish known as laswa, topped with a white diwal (angel-wing clam) — prized for its custard-like texture and flavour. Once overfished almost to extinction, it’s making a comeback thanks to a restricted fishing season.

Similarly, tultul — an artisanal sea salt — is recovering since the government changed restrictions on selling uniodised salts in 2024. Gus grates it over courses and I discover its subtle, creamy flavour. He explains it’s made by burning seawater-soaked driftwood, mixing more seawater into the ashes, then boiling the strained solution with coconut milk.

Batwan, diwal and tultul are all in the Slow Food movement’s Ark of Taste, a catalogue of native ingredients that are at risk of disappearing. But thanks to the efforts of pioneers such as Kiko, these precious ingredients — and their associated traditions — now have a decent chance of survival. “I’m up for this game; I’m up for the fight,” says Kiko. “I just need to get the word out.” 

One of the most significant words in the Hiligaynon language is padayon: to continue, to persist, to endure. Here, I see it everywhere: in the gold-edged ripples on the fishpond, in the flakes of tultul still glittering on Gus’s grater and in the smoke that curls from the wood fire, vanishing into perfumed air.