Binasuan, buro and Bayambang

We continue our series on Philippine parks and plazas this week by heading south from San Carlos, Pangasinan, which was our last week’s stop. We enter another large town, Bayambang, which is home to close to 120,000 souls. At the center of this settlement, which dates from the 1500s, is a plaza of regular geometry but with some quirky contents.

Bayambang is an old town and is the province’s southernmost municipality. It is the gateway to neighboring Tarlac. It takes its name from a tree that use to cover most of the town’s idyllic landscape.

Bayambang’s political and social history is tied to the bigger town of San Carlos, as well as connections to settlements and people across the border to Tarlac. The town was a temporary revolutionary provincial and national capital used by a fleeing General Emilio Aguinaldo. It’s fortunes aligned with others in the area during the American and Commonwealth eras. Post-Philippine independence, it continued a fairly un-eventual path to its present state.

Bayambang recently celebrated the 400th anniversary of its founding in April 1614. To mark this, the town went for and was successful in becoming the new holder of the Guinness World Record for the longest barbecue grill. Bayambang folk grilled eight kilometers of tilapia to defeat the previous record holder in Turkey.

Aside from this modern record the town can boast about, Bayambang is known for two interesting examples of heritage, the Binasuan and Buro. The first is an acrobatic folk dance involving balancing and twirling glasses lit with candles inside, with these wrapped in handkerchiefs. The second is a type of strong smelling fish sauce that’s an acquired taste.

I prefer dancing the Binasuan, which I learned and performed as a member of the UP Filipiñana Folkloric Group. We performed this and a wide repertoire of other distinctive Philippine songs and dances all over Europe in the late 1970s. That was where I first experienced the western plazas and architecture that influenced our own.

Bayambang is still primarily agricultural, but its residential areas are growing. The town center or commercial district covers about 10 hectares of its total of about 12,000 hectares. Bayambang’s commercial district revolves around a plaza of about 1.5 hectares in area. The plaza’s rectangular geometry has a long side parallel to the Agno River.

It was common for plazas to be located near a river because markets had to be close to what was the primary means of transport then — the water. The location also allowed the church’s façade and bell tower to be landmarks that greeted travellers.

The church of Bayambang is named after St. Vincent Ferrer. The original was a wooden structure with an attached convent. It was built by Fr. Manuel Mora in 1804 but subsequently damaged by an earthquake. In the 18th century there were three cycles of destruction and rebuilding because of fires and earthquakes. The current church is based on the reconstructed edifice before the American era.

The church was in Philippine baroque but late 19th-century renovations added neo-classic touches. There have been additional changes due to damages in the Second World War and in the succeeding decades but the main church appears largely intact, with the bell tower being the obvious contemporary renovation.

The church and its associated school define the western side of the town plaza.

The northern border consists of the municipal complex. The old town hall appears to have gone through two or three major changes from the American period. The older structure reminds me of the old town hall in Dumaguete and a few other towns. Most of the area fronting the present structures is devoted to parking and hard surfaces. The other two sides of the plaza and its perimeter roads are filled with commercial structures, with the eastern side containing the connection across the Agno River, making the plaza a symmetrical terminus approaching from points southeast.

The town’s large plaza is essentially intact. There was an encroaching building, a Savings & Loan bank in one corner, which was torn down by the present administration under Mayor Cesar Quiambao, so the plaza is clear of any extraneous private structure or function. The controversial structure was up for a long time and its demolition was a long time coming. Local advocates had to reportedly call for the help of Senator Aquilino Pimentel to make this happen and to “free the park from the commerce of man…”

I rate Bayambang plaza a 7 out of 10. Despite the open space of the plaza being intact, a good portion of its southern section (fronting the church) and northern section (fronting the municipal hall) is devoted to parking with little in terms of shade trees. This happens to many Philippine plazas and reduces the green component of the space, along with raising the ambient temperature.

Another third of the plaza is a wide paved expanse (again treeless). The remaining sections are divided around this large central paved area. There is the requisite Rizal monument (old Rizal, but newish plinth). This is surrounded by trellised seating areas, a pavilion, and concrete dinosaurs. Concrete animals are a staple in many Philippine plazas, probably an offshoot of the Luneta playground follies of the 1960s.

All in all, Bayambang makes for a short but interesting stop if you’re on your way to the Pangasinan coast. There are limited tourism distractions but the town is on its way up the urbanization ladder. On the urban design and planning side, it could do with looking at conserving its open space, greening it up a bit more and looking at the river and riverside as features and component of progress.

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