Manila Audio Tours

National Artist Nick Joaquin wrote that Manila was 'a city of layers', and it is impossible to argue with him. Miguel Lopez de Legazpi planted the walled city of Intramuros here in 1571, turning a Malay settlement on the Pasig River into the capital of the Spanish East Indies. For more than two centuries, the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade ran silver from South American mines west to Asia and silks east to the Americas, making this small river city one of the most consequential trading posts on Earth. Almost none of the original colonial fabric survived the Second World War: Manila was the second-most destroyed city of the war after Warsaw, reduced to rubble in the fighting of February and March 1945.

What was rebuilt carries that history in its foundations rather than its facades.

Intramuros, the old walled city, was partially reconstructed and still shows its Spanish bones in the grid of streets and the massive walls of Fort Santiago, where the national hero Jose Rizal spent his final hours before his execution in 1896. Rizal Park, the great civic space along the Bay, connects this colonial history to the post-war republic that grew around it. The Pasig River, once a commercial artery connecting the bay to Laguna de Bay, is now undergoing restoration after decades of industrial damage.