Greetings from the Philippines!

Feast of the Black Nazarene

09 January, Quiapo, Manila
A grand devotional fiesta, this festival centers on the 400-year old image of the Black Nazarene enshrined at the St. John the Baptist Church or Quiapo Church.
The Recollect Missionaries transported the miraculous image to the Philippines by galleon from Acapulco, Mexico in 1606. First enthroned in Bagumbayan (Luneta), it was transferred to Intramuros before being finally enshrined in the church in Quiapo. This transfer is commemorated every January 9 with a solemn Mass and a procession joined by thousands of barefoot devotees as a form of penance for sins committed and thanksgiving for blessings received. After the main Mass, the life-size statue of the Black Nazarene is placed on a gilded carriage for the spectacular procession that slowly inches its way through a traditional route.
During the procession, the mammoth crowd of barefoot male devotees take turns clambering up the carriage to touch the image, and in pulling the rope as a fulfillment of their annual panata (solemn promise) in gratitude for the many miracles they attribute to the image of the Black Nazarene.

Ati-atihan

3rd Sunday of January, Kalibo, Aklan
The Ati-Atihan Festival is the wildest among Philippine fiestas. It is considered the ultimate in paganistic revelry honoring the Santo Nino, when, during the last three days of the week-long festival, celebrants paint their faces with black soot and wear bright, outlandish costumes as they carouse and dance in the streets to the hypnotic beating of drums and incessant shouts of "Hala bira!"
The Ati-atihan legend goes that in the second decade of the 13th century, the first group of Bornean datus (Maraynon) to come to the islands landed in Panay. They liked the island so much they offered to buy it from the inhabitants, the dark-skinned tribe of Negritos (Atis). The irresistible offer included a headgear and basin made of beaten gold. After the sale, the datus cut up the island into what is now Aklan, Iloilo and Antique. In time, however, problems arose between the Maraynon and the Atis and to avert possible violence, a meeting was arranged between the Bornean chief, Datu Puti, and the Ati headman, Marikudo. A new pact was forged and to celebrate the event, there was a frenzy of dancing and feasting that went on for days.
With the arrival of the Spaniards four or five centuries later, this Ati-Maraynon merrymaking was later incorporated into the celebration of the feast day of the Santo Nino. However, the Atis, who resented the little image venerated by the new settlers, did not participate in the merrymaking and left their settlements for the mountains.
With the Atis gone, the celebrants just painted their faces and extremities with black soot and aped the dance of the Atis, hence the name Ati-Atihan which means "make-believe Atis".
The Ati-Atihan Festival of Kalibo is considered the Mardi Gras of the Philippines.

Sinulog

3rd Sunday of January, Cebu City
The Sinulog is considered a festival of hope and good cheer. It is a prayer-dance synchronized to the beat of drums and shouts of "Pit Senor! Viva Sto. Nino!"
The Sinulog festival is held in honor of the image of the Santo Nino, a gift to the Queen of Cebu from the navigator Ferdinand Magellan, who landed on the island in 1521. Masses, procession, dancing and parades mark the weeklong event.
A story goes that the first procession of the Santo Nino was held after the men of conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legaspi recovered the image from a burning house.
The native women and children saw the procession, and forgetting their fear of the white strangers, they came out from hiding and joined the crowd to sway their bodies in a soulful dance. The dance was probably the beginning of the dance-prayer Sinulog.
Sinulog comes from the root word sulog, which means river current because the dance movement resembles that of a current of wave: two steps forward and one step backward.
For more than 20 years, the celebration of the feast of the Santo Nino has been turned into a huge and elaborate street pageant. The street dancing festivity called Sinulog sa Sugbu was started in 1981 and held every third Sunday of January thereafter. The project ect raised the awareness of Cebu's history among the younger generation and has attracted visitors from other provinces and other countries.
The Sinulog in Cebu is an unbelievably colorful, throbbing, and vibrant pageantry with folks lining up the streets to gawk at goings on while young and old devotees flock to the Basilica del Santo Nino to light candles and pray and dance for their beloved 400-year old icon.
Dinagyang

4th weekend of January, Ilo-ilo City
Dinagyang is a spectacle characterized by frenetic stomping of feet and hypnotic sounds of whistles and drums. It is a colorful whirl of thousands of people dressed in unique costumes, dancing and chanting all day and night as they honor the Senor Santo Nino.
In 1968, Fr. Sulpicio Ebderes brought a replica of the image of the Senor Santo Nino from Cebu City to the San Jose Parish Church with a delegation of Confradia del Santo Nino Cebu members. The first parish feast of Senor Santo Nino was celebrated in 1969. From 1969, the celebration was casually called "Iloilo Ati-Atihan" to differentiate it from that more famous Mardi Gras-like revelry of Kalibo, Aklan.
The late Pacifico Sumagpao Sudario, an old-time llonggo writer and radio broadcaster, coined the word Dinagyang. He first used the name of the festival when it was launched in 1977.
Through the years, the Dinagyang Festival has not only meant fun and laughter for the Ilonggos. It has also become a period of thanksgiving and offering for all the blessings received even if the street pageantry has turned more cultural than religious.

Panagbenga Baguio Flower Festival

2nd week of February, Baguio City
Panagbenga is the Kankanaey word for "a season for blossoming, a time for flowering" and the Panagbenga, Baguio Flower Festival is exactly that as Baguio City blooms, literally and figuratively, during the festival.

The Panagbenga is an annual pageantry showcasing the best of the Cordillera Administrative Region's cultural, historical and natural bounties.

The celebration kicks off with a street dancing participated in by school children wearing headdresses and headgears made of flowers, real or their creative interpretations in the most colorful paper, cellophanes, plastic materials and cloths.
Panagbenga, Baguio Flower Festival highlights include the search for the Festival Queen; exhibits of the region's arts and crafts, flowering and ornamental plants, native products; barangay beautification contest; and presentations of tribal traditions and rituals in song and dance.
The festival reaches a climax when Session Road, the city's main street, is literally transformed into a sea of flowers by a most beautiful grand parade participated in by a multitude of contingents of people arrayed in floral costumes and finery and floats made of real flowers of all colors and sizes, leaves in all imaginable hues, moss, branches and twigs.
During the parade, the contingents go marching, sashaying, and dancing to the heightened beat of traditional gongs, reed flutes and drums and the resounding music of the brass bands while the flower floats inch their way down Session Road.

Moriones

Holy Week, Marinduque
The Moriones is the most colorful pageant held during the Holy Week in the island of Marinduque – particularly in the towns of Boac, Mogpog and Gasan - where the celebrants don oversized Roman legionnaire masks and reenact the legend of Longinus.
The wearers themselves, in a secret ceremony, carve the Moriones mask as playing a morion is a form of sacrifice or penitence and no one must know the penitent's identity.
The legend goes that Longinus was a blind Roman legionnaire who pierced the side of the crucified Christ. When the blood that spurted forth touched his blind eye, his sight was fully restored.
This miracle converted Longinus to Christianity and, having earned the ire of his fellow centurions, had joined the rest of the Christians hiding from the Romans.

During the Moriones festival, the masked and costumed penitents morions march around the town for seven days searching for Longinus. The reenactment reaches its climax when Longinus is caught and beheaded.

The Moriones festival is most spectacular in Marinduque's capital town of Boac because it is the venue of the grand staging of the beheading of Longinus. The town also has the most number of morions in the island province. On the other hand, the seaport town of Mogpog is best known for the most elaborate masks and headgears of its morions while Gasan is more popular for the young morions going around town in small groups, asking for charity/treats (caridad) as they rhythmically strike a wooden musical instrument, creating a unique sound heard only during the Marinduque Moriones festival.

Cutud Lenten Rites

Holy Week (Good Friday), San Fernando, Pampanga
The most unusual observance of Holy Week in the country takes place in the village of San Pedro Cutud in San Fernando, Pampanga. Here, the villagers give a different meaning to the Lenten season with their own unique rendition of self-flagellation.
This ancient ritual begins, in some hallowed place, in the early morning of Good Friday, with the ritualistic infliction of wounds on the backs of the penitents who shroud their faces with cloth and wound wild medicinal vines, even real thorns, around their heads. Amid the sound of old women devotees' peculiar sing-song lamentation of the life and passion of Christ, the flagellants, stripped to the waist, emerge into the streets and, under the sweltering heat of the sun, they rhythmically whip their bleeding backs in atonement of past sins.
Before noon, an unforgettable spectacle unfolds on a barren hill in San Pedro Cutud where some flagellants go to the extreme in the public atonement of their sins --- crucifixion.
Either stripped to the waist or arrayed in crimson robes replete with cords around their waists, the flagellants' extremities are first tied securely to the wooden crosses. At a given signal, real nails are driven on the palms of each hand and on their feet. Most of the flagellants let out piercing screams while others silently bear the utter pain of their penitential vows.
A few of the crucified penitents drop out at this point. The others stay nailed on the wooden cross. Those who have a higher threshold of pain or who have committed heavier sins, are determined to be lowered only when the church ritual recollection of The Seven Last Words ends precisely at 3 o'clock.

Then, as the solemn candle-lit procession of the Santo Sepulcro (Dead Christ) ends on Good Friday afternoon, San Pedro Cutud becomes all quiet again.

Salubong

Easter Sunday, Nationwide
At dawn, Easter bells peal nationwide, signalling the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And in churchyards, the moving story of the salubong - the meeting of the mourning mother and the risen Son - is retold.
Immediately after the first dawn mass, two processions emerge from the church - one led by the image of the mourning mother of Christ and the other led by the Risen Christ. The two processions meet at a designated place - the Galilea. When the mourning mother and the risen Son meet, an angel is gently lowered from a bamboo canopy to remove the Mother's veil.
Various folk beliefs connected with harvest are curiously intermingled with this religious rite. A smooth unveiling predicts a bountiful harvest. A fallen veil portends drought. A crumpled tip foretells few full grains. But as a feast, it is a joyful occasion filled with renewed hope and expectations of better things to come.

Flores de Mayo Santacruzan

May, Nationwide
May is when the flowers bloom, and the month-long Marian devotion is observed with the holding of the Flores de Mayo and Santacruzan.

The Flores de Mayo is a floral parade/procession held in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Here, couples are arrayed in white and carry, in flower form, the attributes of the Virgin Mary. After the procession, a reception is held at the house of the principal sponsor, the hermana mayor.

The Santacruzan is a pageant procession that recalls the quest of Empress Helena, mother of Constantine and legendary seeker of the True Cross on which Christ was nailed. The storyline goes that on the night before the decisive battle for Rome, Constantine had a dream in which a voice told him that he could win the battle if his soldiers would mark their shields with the cross. Constantine was a pagan but the recurring dream bothered him, so he thought that there was nothing to lose if he ordered what the voice told him. To his surprise, his troops won the battle and in gratitude, Constantine urged his mother, Empress Helena, long a Christian convert, to look for the True Cros.
The quest was not easy as three hundred years had passed since Christ had died on the Cross. But Empress Helena kept on tracking down the True Cross until she got to Calvary where she found three crosses and some nails. To separate the True Cross from the other two, the Bishop of Jerusalem helped her test all three for miraculous powers. When a dead person came to life and sick people were cured at the touch of one of the crosses, Empress Helena knew she held the true one in her hand. She divided the True Cross into three parts: one for the Church of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, another for the basilica which she had built in Calvary and the third she presented to a new convert, her son Constantine.
This story of the quest forms the core of the Santacruzan with the procession carried on with lively, lilting singing of the Dios Te Salve Maria, the Spanish version of Hail Mary.
To most Filipinos, the Flores de Mayo and Santacruzan during the month of May is a time to work together and re-live a grandiose spiritual tradition.

Pista'y Dayat

1 May, Lingayen, Pangasinan
Pista'y Dayat (Feast of the Sea) has grown from its simple beginning as a thanksgiving celebration of nature's blessings to a full-fledge tourism attraction that gathers thousands of visitors every year.
Falling on the first day of May, Pangasinenses and visitors from nearby towns simply cannot make their Labor Day complete without a visit to the historic Lingayen Beach. The Pistay Dayat is also an occasion for Pangasinenses to get family, relatives and friends together for a day of feasting on native delicacies of the province such as the tupig, patupat, bocayo, diket as a fitting accompaniment to the bounty of the sea like the milkfish, the samaral, sugpo (giant shrimps), crabs bursting with yellow-orange fat, oysters and many others only the sea can offer.

Pahiyas

15 May, Lucban and Sariaya, Quezon
Pahiyas, meaning "precious offering," is a festival held in the quaint and lovely towns of Sariaya and Lucban, Quezon to honor the patron saint of farmers, San Isidro Labrador.
San Isidro was born in Madrid in 1070 and he spent all his life as a tenant farmer. He was so devout he prayed even in the fields and legend is that, while he knelt and prayed, angels came down to plow for him. He and his wife, Santa Maria de la Cabeza, are Madrid's patron saints.
The feast of San Isidro honors the bounty of the earth and the fruit of all labors and in celebration the townsfolk of Sariaya and Lucban deck their homes with a rich variety of decorations called kiping (brilliantly colored rice wafers) arranged in floral motifs or in chandelier-like patterns. Harvested vegetables like squash, eggplant, pumpkin etc. are also used as decorations. These meticulously prepared decor adorn houses with their patterns and textures, giving a splash of spectacular color not found anywhere else. It is a show window of unique folk art indigenous only to Lucban and Sariaya.
The highlight of the celebration in both towns is the procession of the image of San Isidro Labrador through the streets lined with their beautifully decorated homes. Local folk believe that the passing of their saint's procession assures an abundance of harvest in the future.
Carabao Festival

15 May, San Isidro, Nueva Ecija /

Pulilan, Bulacan /Angono, Rizal
Farmers pay tribute to the carabao during the feast day of San Isidro Labrador, their patron saint. The carabao, the beast of burden farmers use in plowing their fields and carrying their harvests, becomes king for the day.
During the carabao festival, farmers assemble their carabaos at the churchyard -carefully cleaned and groomed, adorned with flowers, yokes replaced by wreaths festooned with ribbons and flowers — to be blessed by the priest, complete with the sprinkling of holy water. After the blessing ceremony, the beasts of burden are lined up to parade around the town amid the cheering of the townsfolk and visiting spectators.
The festival's highlight comes with the blessing of the animals for the second time. At this point, the carabaos are lined up and geared for the race across the fields. At a given signal, the thunderous stampede of hooves resounds as the animals race against each other toward the finish line. It is amazing to see the bulky beasts thunder to a halt at the finish line and kneel there as in prayer as the priest blesses them once more.

Obando Fertility Rites

17-19 May, Obando, Bulacan
The little town of Obando, Bulacan holds a fiesta honoring not one but three patron saints: Sta. Clara de Assisi, the patron saint of the childless; San Pascual Baylon, a 16th century shepherd who prayed by dancing and who became a model of religious virtue; and, Our Lady of the Salambao to whom fishermen and farmers pray for a good catch and a bountiful harvest.

In the Obando Fertility Rites, dance is the medium of prayer — in keeping with native tradition. The devotees chant their prayers and dance around the streets of Obando, all the way to the main altar. The dancing is feverish as they ask San Pascual for a wife, Santa Clara de Assisi for a husband, and the Virgen de Salambao for a good catch, good harvest and a child, too.

Old folks say the Virgen de Salambao was so named because two brothers, Juan and Julian de la Cruz, fished her out of the waters on June 19, 1763, while they were disengaging their fishing net atop a bamboo raft. The town has since adopted the Virgen de Salambao as their third patron saint.
The festival's main attraction is the dance performed by childless women to the tune of the Sta. Clara song ending at the church, where they request intercession for their needs. Today, not only the childless women dance in Obando. Men and children also join for various petitions.

Mudpack Festival

24 June, Murcia, Negros Occidental
This festival in Mambukal, Murcia is a celebration of the symbolic return of man to primitive times when he was closer to nature. It seeks to instill in people the awareness and care of the environment and the use of natural materials in arts and crafts. The highlight of the festival is a merry making with dancers whose faces are covered with mudpack and bodies painted with Mambukal clay.

Parada ng Lechon

24 June, Balayan Batangas
A different sight and flavor are introduced in June with a festival popularly known as the "Parada Ng Lechon" in Balayan, Batangas.
In this festival which coincides with the feast of St. John the Baptist, Balayan's patron saint, the lechon or succulent roasted pig becomes the center of attraction. Decked out in their platforms and replete with appropriate props and accessories and all kinds of adornments, these tempting lechons are paraded in town together with the procession of the revered image of St. John the Baptist amid the boisterous, riotous sprinkling and dousing of water very much like the ritual of baptism.
After the parade, the lechons are brought back home or some clubs' headquarters for a virtual bacchanalia of feasting and drinking of beer, liquor, and invariably lambanog, the local firewater.
The Parada ng Lechon typifies the Filipino fiesta as it is really a time to be pious and have fun and be hospitable with the sharing of the lechon.

Pintados Festival

29 June, Tacloban City, Leyte
The Pintados is a revival of the old custom of Filipinos in Leyte (and other parts of the Visayan) of painting their bodies as a symbol of rank and honor. Pintados is the name the Spaniards gave to the island's inhabitants who decorated their bodies with tattoos.
During the pre-Hispanic years, tattoos signified courage among the natives of Tacloban. These days, they symbolize a cultural revival, and a wild fiesta called the Pintados.
The festival highlight is the street dancing parade that showcases participants with colorful and creatively painted bodies. The many Pre-Spanish traditions, including the worship of idols, are also depicted in dance and accompanied by the playing of indigenous music with a hypnotic and rhythmic beat.

Sandugo Festival

Movable, Tagbilaran City, Bohol
The festival commemorates the signing of a treaty of friendship between the Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi and Rajah Sikatuna, chieftain of Bohol. The blood-sealed peace treaty was held on the shores of Bohol in March 1565. The festival was celebrated in March until a few years ago when it was moved to the month of July.
This historic event is remembered today with an all-out fiesta at the island's capital city, Tagbilaran. The commemorative celebration includes the spectacular Sandugo street dancing parade featuring ten colorfully dressed groups dancing to the beat of drums, a traditional Filipino carnival, a martial arts festival, and Miss Bohol Sandugo Beauty Pageant. Sandugo festival participants also reenact the historic blood compact in a grand staging — an unforgettable scenario of the once-bloody past of the beautiful island province of Bohol.

Kadayawan sa Davao

3rd Week of August, Davao City
Davao's annual festival, Kadayawan Sa Dabaw, coincides with the harvest of fruits and blooming of flowers.
The festival promises a weekend of fanfare and fun - tribal style as it showcases Davao's arts and cultural heritage with ethno-cultural presentations, agro-industrial fair, festivals expo, indigenous dance competitions, street parties, food fiesta, and other activities. The festivities reach a glorious climax on Saturday morning with the spectacular Kadayawan parade featuring astonishingly beautiful, colorful orchid-and-fern bedecked floats and ethnic groups dancing to the beat of wooden drums, bamboo instruments, kumbing, native three-stringed guitars and other indigenous instruments and, invariably, the tinkling sound of tiny brass bells wound around wrists, waists and ankles.
Earlier, the festival was called "Apo Duwaling," a contraction of the famous icons of the city, Mt. Apo, durian and waling-waling. It was later renamed "Kadayawan sa Dabaw" to better reflect the merry spirit and indigenous theme of the celebration for Dayaw is a Dabawenyo word meaning good, valuable, superior or beautiful.