Beautiful Bacong

From Carcar, Cebu we travel back to Bacong, Negros Oriental, for the fourth in our series on Philippine plazas. The town of Bacong is just south of Dumaguete, whose plaza we featured two weeks ago. It’s a fairly small town of just over 30,000 people but its plaza is large, well-maintained, and blessed with beautiful heritage buildings of note.

Bacong, like most Visayan towns, is a coastal settlement. Established in 1801, the center of this 25- square-kilometer, 22-barangay municipality is a large seven-hectare civic and institutional block. This is anchored at its southwest corner by a sprawling plaza and town hall complex that covers an area of about two hectares.

The plaza is framed today by the mature acacia and mahogany trees that line three sides, along with a glimpse of its elegant town hall on the plaza’s northeast quadrant. In earlier days, when the trees were smaller, this building and the much older town church beside the row of acacias would have been the defining elements of the space.

The plaza is about a hundred meters wide by a little over a hundred meters deep. The frontage along the main road and the interior of the plaza is devoid of trees, allowing a full visual sweep of the area but also making it unusable during most of the day because of lack of shade. Only the edges are under the deep canopies of the majestic acacias.

The plaza is host to three statues and a tennis court. The oldest statues are of Dr. Jose Rizal and Leon Kilat, the hometown hero and Visayan leader of the revolution. Both monuments were erected in 1926. The third monument, built in the ’70s, is a well-proportioned equestrian statue of a Katipunan officer leading a charge.

Leon Kilat was born Pantaleon Villegas y Soldi in 1873. Although he was born in Bacong, he made his way as a young man to Manila via a traveling circus. This is where he found work and settled. Eventually he joined the Katipunan movement. He was active in the spreading of the secret group, in a short time moving up to join its secret council. When the actual revolution started, Leon led the rebels in Cebu. He was betrayed and killed by his own aide-de-camp in Carcar, Cebu (we highlighted his monument in that city’s plaza in this column last week).

Both Rizal and Leon Kilat’s statues are well preserved and maintained. The only thing I must point out is that both are painted in full Technicolor, as opposed to the all-white treatment of classical carved or cast-stone statues. This practice seems to be prevalent in a lot of provincial towns and cities for their landmarks. Many such painted statues look kitschy and are a little off putting. Although history reminds us that the Greeks painted their statues similarly, I prefer monuments in bronze or monochrome stone.

Bacong’s plaza is large, but the town’s municipal hall is of modest dimensions. Its Greek-revival façade is a simple colonnade much like Federal-style civic structures built in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. On closer examination, I espied a plaque marking the building’s inauguration in 1972. It most probably replaced the original structure. All this being said, the building is refreshingly restrained compared with newer edifices in other towns and cities. Many civic buildings today try to look like wannabe Makati towers or BPO complexes.

The town’s heritage jewel is its Church of St. Agustine of Hippo and its fabled pipe organ. The church’s current structure was built in 1895, most probably replacing and older church or visita (chapel). Its sits with its façade and belfry close to and facing the shore as do most churches of the era, since the water was the main avenue of transport then.  The orientation also allowed a good vantage point from the church’s belfry (the tallest in the province) for monitoring of maurading pirates. 

The church was declared by the National Museum as a National Cultural Treasure in 2002. The exterior appears to have been conserved but the job seems not to be finished. Vegetation compromise the bell tower (a worrying indication of moisture penetrating into the stone cracks) and the exposed brickwork of the facade is missing the protective covering of palitada.

Most of the interior of the church is renovated except for the altar, which is said to be the oldest in the province. It remains one of two original elements. The church’s pipe organ is the other. It was ordered from Zaragoza, Spain and installed in 1894, a project of the town’s first parish priest, Rev. Joaquin Soriano. The pipe organ was restored in 2009.

Beside the church, its convent building appears to have been conserved and is kept in good condition. Part of the complex is used as a museum and houses religious artifacts.

Finally, behind the plaza is a waterfront park with a covered multipurpose court and a rudimentary seafront esplanade festooned with whimsical seats in concrete shaped as animals.

I would rate Bacong Plaza a seven out of 10. It has kept most of its open area intact. There are only three statues in the plaza, and both the church and town hall are kept in good condition despite modern interventions to some of the historic fabric.

I would recommend a visit to Bacong for the church, its annual Sinulog de San Miguel fiesta, and the distinctive stoneware sold at the Negros Oriental Arts and Heritage shop nearby.

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Feedback is welcome. Please email the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail,com.