History,  Philippines

Filipino history lessons in Vigan

April 18, 2025 / 25 Comments

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

Audrey Hepburn

It must be museums week at Travel with Me, because after taking you to Manila’s Ayala Museum a few days ago, today I want to introduce you to a couple of museums we visited in Vigan. Although my usual preference when travelling is to be out and about absorbing local colour, time spent in a smaller museum in particular can be a very rewarding complement to this. And as Audrey Hepburn remarked, it is often not until later that you properly absorb and reflect on what you saw.

Of course, the contents of some museums will appeal to us more than will others, depending on our interests. In some we will study every exhibit, in others hurry through stopping to glance at only a few. My father-in-law used to drive us crazy by stopping not only to look at everything but also to read all the labels! I tend to be more selective, focusing on those things that catch my eye for some reason and reading only about the most fascinating. And sometimes I find the museum building of as much, or even more, interest as the collections within. It may be a modern building with striking architecture, or, as in the case of these two in Vigan, an historic one with stories to tell.  

The Father Burgos House

This is the former home of Padre Jose Burgos. The lovely old house (photo above) was built in 1788 and is now a museum.

Father Burgos was a Filipino Roman Catholic priest who campaigned for the full incorporation of Filipino priests into the Catholic hierarchy in the country, which at the time was dominated by Spanish friars. He was arrested on false charges of sedition and incitement to mutiny, and executed in 1872. A nearby plaza is named for him and has a monument to him.

Plaza Burgos

The house is an example of the traditional Filipino bahay na bato buildings developed during the Spanish colonial era. It was an adaption of the local bahay kubo style of building, which was a house on stilts. The bahay na bato took this skeleton but replaced the wood with stone foundations (bahay na bato means ‘house of stone’) and filled in the lower floor. The custom of using the lower floor for storage and the upper for living quarters was retained. That upper floor was built largely of wood with windows of capiz shell. The wide entrance below was designed so that a carriage could be driven inside and the occupants descend without exposure to the elements.

Today the house serves as a museum, one of three in the Ilocos Regional Museum complex here in Vigan. It displays some original furniture but is less ‘home-like’ than Casa Manila.

Carcel de Vigan

Nearby we visited the old provincial jail, the Carcel. This started as a small town jail facility in 1657, and served as the provincial jail of Ilocos Sur from 1818 onwards. Elpidio Quirino, the Sixth President of the Republic (1948-53), was born in this building in 1890 while his father was serving as warden. He later converted part of it into a library which he named in honour of his mother, Gregoria M. Rivera. It remains today the main public library of the city.

In 2014 the prisoners were moved to a new provincial penitentiary in the adjacent town of Bantay and the old jail was donated by the provincial government to serve as part of the regional museum complex.

Various sections include an exhibit about the life of President Quirino with artefacts and paintings. One room is full of paintings telling the story of the Basi Revolt which were commissioned by the Spanish to deter future rebellion. Basi is the traditional sugarcane wine of the Ilocos region, and there are displays of items associated with its production.

Another room had photos and floorplans of some of the churches in the region, which we were to visit later in our stay, and models of lighthouses. But I confess I found the building, and the signs it still displayed of its former function, more interesting than most of the exhibits!

I visited Vigan in February 2025

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