Welcome to Camarines Norte, the gateway to Bicolandia. It is home to the Calaguas group of islands, national hero Dr. Jose Rizal’s first monument, and the Spanish era pilgrim church of Our Lady of Candelaria.
The province is known for its pristine islands and white sand beaches, enchanting waterfalls and nature retreats, century old churches and historic monuments, as well as scrumptious delicacies.
Camarines Norte was created on April 15, 1920 through Orden Ejecutiva Numero 22, separating it from its twin province of Camarines Sur. The province has 12 municipalities grouped into two congressional districts: one predominantly speaks Tagalog while the other favors Bicolano. The first district is composed of Labo, Capalonga, Sta. Elena, Paracale, and Jose Panganiban while the second district comprises Daet, Vinzons, Talisay, Mercedes, Basud, San Lorenzo and San Vicente.
CamNorte is endowed with a myriad of natural, cultural, and historical sites that make it a complete ecotourism stop. Its top tourism icons are Bagasbas Beach and the First Rizal Monument or “Bantayog” in Daet and Calaguas Islands in Vinzons. Baybay beach in Mercedes is an emerging destination.
The St. Vincent Seminary is the fifth oldest and the last founded in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial regime.
It was established around the same time as the creation of Jaro as a diocese separate from Cebu through a papal bull issued by Pope Pius IX on May 27, 1865 and put into effect by Manila Archbishop Gregorio Meliton Martinez on October 10, 1867.
Fray Mariano Cuartero, the first bishop of Jaro, took possession of his diocese on April 25, 1868 and immediately put into motion his plans for the establishment of a diocesan seminary.
Aware of the great work of the Vincentian Fathers in the formation of native secular priests in other areas, the bishop sought their help in the creation of a seminary where he could train good pastors for the different parishes that were then almost entirely under the spiritual administration of the Augustinian friars.
First Vincentian priests
Vincentian priests arrived in Jaro in December of 1869, according to parish records, to organize and direct the seminary, and Fr. Ildefonso Moral was appointed as its superior.
Fr. Moral was joined by Fr. Aniceto Gonzales, who oversaw the construction of the seminary building and later succeeded as rector, and newly ordained priest Fr. Juan Miralda. They made up the community of Vincentian Fathers that first came to Jaro.
At the start, the seminary operated out of the bishop’s residence.
Through the generous donations of parishioners, in particular the sisters Ana and Maria Sitchon, the priest Mariano Sitchon, and Doña Gregoria Hingson, all from Molo, and from other smaller contributions, Bishop Cuartero was able to buy a 22,000-square meter lot near the Cathedral and his residence for the seminary. Not long after, on March 11, 1871, the cornerstone was laid and construction started under the direction of Fr. Aniceto Gonzales.
Third seminary building
The current St. Vincent Seminary building is the third erected since its founding in 1869. It was completed on June 19, 1954 with then Jaro Bishop Jose Ma. Cuenco spearheading efforts to raise funds for its construction.
Two previous structures were destroyed, the first by fire in 1906 and the other in a bombing run by American liberation forces on February 20, 1945 near the end of the Second World War.
The seminary complemented its new and modern building with an enlarged plan of studies. Its Departments of Latin and Philosophy received government accreditation and soon the number of enrolled seminarians broke previous records.
In 1959, seminary obtained government recognition of its studies to grant the AB degree.
Flourishing times
The first seminary building, put up under the rectorship of Fr. Gonzales, was completed in November 1874. A parish book described it as quadrilateral in shape measuring 54×52 meters, with a central 23-square meter patio. The ground floor was stone and brick and the second floor made of hardwood.
When it was opened to lay students in 1875, the number of enrollees became so high that another 46 meters was added to the right wing of the building.
An entry in “Exposición General de las Islas Filipinas en Madrid, 1887 – Memoria” recorded a total seminary enrollment of 5,344 from 1875-1885.
The most flourishing period for the seminary during Spanish times was between 1891-1925 when it introduced five-year course of studies leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was the first of the Vincentian-run seminaries to become a first-class college, getting fully incorporated into the University of Sto. Tomas in 1891.
Filipino-Spanish hostilities
In the course of its 150-year history, seminary life was interrupted twice by war. School days came to an abrupt end during the outbreak of Filipino-Spanish hostilities at the close of 1897 and returned to normal only in 1904-1905.
Filipino revolutionaries in the Visayas, taking their cue from the proclamation of Philippine Independence in Kawit, rose in arms against Spain and on November 17, 1897 formed their own revolutionary government in Santa Barbara with Roque Lopez as president and Martin Delgado as commander-in-chief.
Spanish forces surrendered Jaro to rebel forces after five hours of savage fighting in December 15. They then took over the use of the seminary and ordered the priests expelled over fears they acted as spies.
In the early months of 1898, American soldiers managed to wrest the city away from Delgado’s forces that withdrew to the outskirts and began a guerilla war that lasted for two years
The death of Cuartero’s successor Bishop Leandro Arrue Agudo shortly before the war on October 24, 1897 left the Diocese of Jaro an orphan at its most critical time and the situation was exacerbated by a third of Filipino priests refusing to accept a Spanish friar, Andres Ferrero, as his replacement and their animosity towards the Vincentians who were also Spanish.
Schism of Panay
The Schism of Panay, as it was called, dragged on until Bishop Ferrero was forced to hand in his resignation to the Holy See. He sailed back to Spain on October 27, 1903.
Monsignor Frederick Rooker took over that November and required all priests to renew their oath of obedience and reverence to the bishop. A special meeting was also held in Manila for all major superiors of religious communities and bishops to bring the conflict to an end.
Everything returned to normal beginning in school year 1904-1905 only to be interrupted again by a fire that hit the seminary and reduced it to ashes in 1906. It was caused by a candle left burning in the sacristy by a seminarian.
Classes proceeded but housed temporarily in a spacious building owned by Don Teodoro Benedicto.
With financial support of the priests, people of Jaro, his friends in America, and a substantial amount from Pope Pius X, Bishop Rooker began reconstruction just two months after the fire. The seminary was substantially finished and able to house 100 interns in less than a year. It returned to its own home on September 17, 1907. Just a day after, Bishop Rooker suffered a heart attack and died just hours after.
Seminary, college separation
Two great benefactors of the seminary came in the persons of Jaro Bishop Dennis Dougherty, who succeeded Rooker, and seminary rector Fr. Mariano Napal.
They took on the job of completing the building and achieved this on March 12, 1912.
While enrollment was at an all-time high, accepting lay students affected the original purpose of the seminary which was to train the youth for priesthood.
Vincentian priests took this strong admonition of Pope Pius XI to heart and created a separate Colegio de San Vicente Ferrer that operated out of the Jaro Cathedral convent. However, it closed down definitively two years later.
The separation proved beneficial to the seminarians but caused the seminary to suffer economically as the college was its main source of income.
Bishop McCloskey remedied this by subsidizing the seminary through a system of burses beginning in 1925. While admitted at a hospital in Manila in 1942, he even instructed Msgr. Luis Capalla, Vicar General, to continue assisting seminary.
Japanese occupation
Another interruption to seminary work occurred during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that generated alarm in the Philippines.
The incident prompted Fr. Mariano Auzmendi to close classes, perhaps prematurely. The seminarians went home to the provinces while the priests, 12 of them, and 10 ordinands remained.
Japanese forces began to occupy Iloilo on April 16, 1942, causing a state of terror. The rector brought the ordinands with permission from the Japanese to Bacolod for their priestly ordination in June 29. The priests were allowed to leave for safer places and three of the nine that remained including the rector were said to have died as a result of tension and fear.
Shortly after his consecration, Bishop Jose Ma. Cuenco came to the Jaro Diocese in February 1943 as Auxiliary of Bishop McCloskey who was being treated for an illness in Manila.
Despite the efforts of Cuenco and his newly appointed rector, Fr. Eliseo Rodriguez, the seminary only began to operate normally beginning in January 1946.
Rising from destruction
Iloilo City was liberated from the Japanese by American forces on May 19, 1945, but their bombing runs had levelled the seminary’s home just a few months before.
The task of rebuilding the diocese, which lost not only the seminary but 60 percent of its churches and rectories, fell to Cuenco, who was appointed residential bishop in November 27 of that year with the death of McCloskey.
After a vote of confidence from the Jaro Diocese, the Vincentian fathers returned and focused their efforts on clearing out debris and covering the walls that remained standing with bamboo strips and nipa leaves just to be able to reopen the seminary. On January 7, 1946, classes did resume attended by 32 major seminarians.
The St. Vincent Seminary slowly got back on its feet and a new building, the one you see today, once again rose from the destruction through the efforts of Bishop Cuenco.
Work on the last part of the construction, the right wing, took 10 months and was completed on June 19, 1954.
St. Anne’s Church, more popularly known as Molo Church, is one of the most beautiful churches in the Philippines. It was declared a national landmark by the National Historical Institue in 1992.
The church is of Gothic Renaissance architecture and is the only Gothic church in the country outside of Manila, according to an article in The News Today published last July 24, 2007.
The newspaper wrote that the church was was constructed in 1831 under Fray Pablo Montaño and further expanded and finished by Fray Agapito Buenaflor in 1888 under the supervision of Don Jose Manuel Locsin.
MOLO FIESTA. An undated photo of a fiesta celebration in front of the Molo Church.
The church is dedicated to St. Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It has 16 larger-than-life images of female saints arranged in two rows. These female saints are Sta. Marcela, Apolonia, Genoveva, Isabel, Felicia, Ines, Monica, Magdalena, Juliana, Lucia, Rosa de Lima, Teresa, Clara, Cecilia, Margarita and Marta.
On August 4, 1886, national hero Jose Rizal dropped at Molo on his way back to Manila from exile at Dapitan in Mindanao. He went to see his friend, Raymundo Melliza who showed him the church.
In his diary, Rizal wrote, “We went to Molo to see the church painted by a lad who has left the locality. The church is pretty (iglesia bonita) outside with paintings inside mostly copies of Biblical scenes by Gustave Dore.”
A composite of images of Molo Church and plaza taken in the early 1900s.
During World War II, it served as evacuation center under parish priest Msgr. Manuel Alba.
One of the church’s original towers was destroyed on March 18, 1945. It was used as a machine gun nest by Japanese forces and was shelled by the Americans.
This church dedicated to Our Lady of China developed from a lowly Quonset hut into the imposing structure you see today.
There are two beginnings to its story: in 1953, when Mexican missionary Padre Miguel Pardenas came to Iloilo for a retreat and, about a decade earlier, when the rise of atheism led to the expulsion of the Jesuits from mainland China.
Fr. Pardenas, among the Jesuit missionaries expelled from China, was pastor of the newly created personal parish for the Chinese and Chinese-Filipino Catholics in Cebu City when he came to Iloilo City in 1953 for an Ignatian retreat at Assumption.
The Mother Superior, herself Mexican, told him there was also a need to minister to the big Chinese and Chinese-Filipino population in Iloilo.
Parish beginnings
The idea to create a personal parish for the community got strong support from then Jaro Archbishop Msgr. Jose Ma. Cuenco, and Jesuit China mission superior Fr. O’Brien that same year gave the task to 39-year-old Italian missionary Fr. Guerrino Marsecano.
Marsecano was expelled from Mengkuang, China in December 1952 after four years of hard work in communal farms.
He spent a few months studying the work of Fr. Pardenas in Cebu before going to Iloilo with only 30 pesos in his pocket and with nothing arranged in advance for accommodations.
Marsecano arrived on March 1, 1953 to a warm welcome from the leaders of the Iloilo Catholic Chinese Association (ICCA) and a sizeable crowd of Chinese-Filipino Catholics.
Pope Pius XII decree
On July 5, 1953, during the Holy Mass in Assumption chapel, Msgr. Cuenco read the decree from Pope Pius XII authorizing the creation of a personal parish for Chinese and Chinese-Filipino Catholics in Iloilo City.
Fr. Marsecano became the first priest of the parish dedicated to the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary that first appeared in Donglu, China in the 1900. Although Archbishop Cuenco had given him leave to use any church in the city, Fr. Marsecano had taken to regularly using the Assumption chapel for services.
After a year of services in various churches, Fr. Marsecano and the community realized the need for the Santa Maria Parish to have its own church.
With money raised by ICCA and the Propaganda Fide, Fr. Marsecano bought a lot by the strait of Guimaras not far from the city center with two Quonset huts that housed hospital services during the Second World War and became later on as repair shops for buses.
Quonset huts for chapel, convent
One Quonset hut became the convent and the other was renovated into a chapel under the supervision of the Italian Jesuit missionary Bro. Schiatti. The new chapel was inaugurated on July 25, 1954.
With the parish growing and attendance at church services increasing, plans were made for a bigger structure as the chapel could only sit around a hundred.
Fr. Marsenaco oversaw the initial preparations for a new church but this was cut short when he was transferred to Formosa, the present Taiwan, to work among the French Canadian Jesuits in the Kuangshi district in 1956.
A French Jesuit missionary, Fr. Andre Joliet, who was pulled out of the Chinese apostolate in East Malaya, took his place. The 60-year-old priest spoke English with a heavy accent and had problems with the languages spoken by the Chinese and Ilonggos but he made up for it with his evangelizing zeal. Helping him out beginning in June of 1956 was assistant parish priest Fr. Santiago Leon, who completed a course in the Xiamen language Amoy.
First church mass
When Msgr. Juan Velasco, a Dominican bishop of Amoy and national director of the Chinese mission in the Philippines, came for a pastoral visit in November 1956, he discussed with the Parish Board and ICCA the need for a bigger and more permanent church.
This refreshed efforts to put up a new structure, estimated at 80,000 pesos, and work immediately started with the money left over from Fr. Marsecano’s tenure and donation of 25,000 pesos from Swiss Catholics. A committee chaired by Trinidad Chu organized fund-raising activities to come up with the rest of the funds.
Work on the new church was primed by a donation of 2,000 hollow blocks from the Lopez family. The building design was conceptualized by Benjamin Hilado, dean of the College of Architecture of the University of San Agustin. Construction was undertaken by Oriental Lumber.
Christmas Day of 1957 became a significant milestone for the Santa Maria Parish when it celebrated the first mass in the new church.
Solemn blessing
The Santa Maria Parish Church was solemnly blessed by Msgr. Teofilo Camomot, D.D., auxiliary bishop of Jaro, on April 27, 1958.
After five years, the Chinese-Filipino community finally had a church to call its own. With the donation of a lot and house to serve as parish rectory by Mr. and Mrs. Eduardo Lopez, the physical structure was strengthened for an evangelized and evangelizing Chinese-Filipino community in the city.
Then dean of the College of Fine Arts of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Francisco Ricardo Monti, sculpted the bas relief of Our Lady of China that dominates the facade of the church. He based his work on Chinese artist John Lu Hungnien’s drawing.
Miraculous cross replica
On the wall of the altar in the sanctuary is a cross inspired by the miraculous crucifix of Limpias in the Church of St. Peter in Santander, Spain.
Its Chinese inscription in stained glass is the work of sinologist Fr. John Wang Chang Chi. It reads: Offering-Sacrifice (above the cross beam); The world has been saved by the instrument of torture (under the cross beam, right side); and To feed your soul, you must have spiritual food (under the cross beam, left side).
The statues of the Sacred Heart and the Holy Family are also from Spain. The bell was made by the makers of America’s Liberty Bell.
As one of the few towns located at the southernmost tip of Cebu, Samboan is an unspoiled gem of natural wonders and ancient stone monuments.
It is home to rivers, springs, waterfalls, caves and clean coastlines as well as structures that are hundreds of years old and bear silent witness to Samboan’s early years.
The town center is perched atop hill and forms a landscape that offers a panoramic view of the Tañon Strait and neighboring islands like Negros.
Town officials explain the name Samboan as coming from “sinamboang,” a method of fishing once commonly used by local fishers.
The story goes that during the early Spanish period years, the Spaniards who were the first to reach the town asked a fisherman for the name of the place. The fisherman, who didn’t understand a word of Spanish, thought they wanted to know what he was doing and so he answered “sinamboang.”
For reasons of simplicity and brevity, the name was shortened to Samboang which later on became Samboan.
History
Located shorly before the very tip of the island, Samboan is one of the oldest towns in Cebu.
Historical accounts state the town was spotted by combatants of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi while they were doing reconnaissance of the island from March 15 to April 22, 1565, during the first few months of their arrival in Cebu.
The tranquil place started out as the Encomienda Canamucan and became one of the visitas of the Parroquia de Barili de Santa Ana (parish of Barili) in the 1600s. As a visita, it was under the jurisdiction of the parish priest of Barili who made scheduled visits to hold masses and other religious activities.
Samboan was made an independent parish on November 3, 1784 under the patronage of San Miguel Arcangel (St. Michael Archangel), with Ginatilan, Malabuyoc and Alegria under its territorial jurisdiction. Its first parish priest was Romualdo Avila, a Franciscano Decalzo.
One of the priests that came after him was the great Fray Melchor de Vera, a Jesuit priest that was credited with having built the Spanish fortifications that served as protection against pirate raids.
People’s paradise
Life in Samboan, which is 140 kilometers or four hours of travel by bus from the central city of Cebu, is rustic and simple.
The town has progressed with the times while preserving the old ways, evidenced by the extant centuries-old structures and collection of rare items that offer glimpses into Samboan’s distant past.
People still live on the bounties of the water and the soil.
They seek to preserve the seas that provide them with an abundant catch by creating marine sanctuaries and the land that yield a plentiful harvest by keeping the forests untouched and the waterways clean.
As a result, they’ve created a people’s paradise for everyone to enjoy, in the form of unspoiled waterfalls, rivers, and seas.
Quick facts
Classification: 5th class municipality Population: 18,140 (2010 census) Land Area: 4,500 hectares No. of barangays: 15: Barangays Basak Bonbon, Bulangsuran, Calatagan, Cambigong, Camburoy, Cañorong, Colase, Dalahikan, Jumangpas, Monteverde, Poblacion, San Sebastian, Suba and Tangbo Distance from Cebu City: 140 km, southwest of Cebu City Estimated time of arrival from Cebu: 4 hours via public transport Means of transportation from Cebu: Bus Livelihood: Farming and fishing
