The waterways Cebu forgot – lessons from old maps

An interesting forum was held at Palm Grass, The Cebu Heritage Hotel, last Saturday afternoon, August 16, 2025, titled “Bahà! Tracing Cebu's Lost Waterways, Facing the Floods: How Cebu’s Lost Waterways Could Hold the Key to Flood Resilience.” The event was hosted by the multi-awarded heritage advocate Agripina Guivelondo, the initiator and mover behind Palm Grass and the Tres de Abril Foundation.

In tracing Cebu’s lost waterways, the forum was fortunate to have Cebu City’s adopted son, Dr. Michael Cullinane, a Cebu historian and associate director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Also present at the forum was architect Jhomarie Villarojo, who heads the Planning and Design Division of the Cebu City Planning and Development Office.

Incidentally, the day before the forum, severe flooding hit many parts of Metro Cebu, killing one person in Paknaan, Mandaue City, who was reportedly trying to save his submerged taxi. Floods now seem to have become a regular feature in the metro because of unusually heavy rains, prompting one person I spoke with the other day to remark that the word “taligsik” (drizzle), has been lost in our vocabulary, since rains almost always come torrential and punishing these days, a result of the warming earth.

It turns out from the forum that the areas around Metro Cebu being prone to flooding is no surprise, since historically Cebu City and its surroundings had many natural waterways. Our tragedy is that we have made it worse because of poor urban planning and the lack of adaptation measures.

Dr. Cullinane pointed out that Spanish maps from the 16th to the 19th centuries show the city as a small, sparsely-populated settlement ringed by “riachuelos” (streams) and “pantanos” (swamps or catchment areas). These natural features shaped the Spanish quarter around Fort San Pedro, Santo Niño, and the Cathedral, while Parian, home to the Chinese community, and the Lutao settlement, often associated with the Badjaos, were deliberately placed outside it, separated by waterways and esteros.

The old maps are striking. In the maps of 1699 and 1833, one sees bridges crossing the Parian Estero and ‘San Bonguillo’, swamps stretching through Tinago and Tejero, and drainage ditches dug by the Spaniards to keep their quarter dry. “When we look at the old maps of Cebu, we realize that to get from one part of the city to the other part of the city that is mostly roads now, you had to cross bridges,” Cullinane said.

Tinago, in fact, once appeared as an island before reclamation and drying transformed it into part of the mainland. Even then, Spanish chroniclers described flooding and high tides as a nuisance. Dr. Cullinane stressed that much of the city’s expansion in the 19th century came by building houses and roads over swamps and dried-up canals, transforming catchment areas into urban settlements. By the late 1800s, large portions of friar lands around Talamban, Banilad, and beyond were also being reshaped, further altering the natural flow of water.

Flooding, in other words, is not new to us in Cebu. What is new is how much worse we’ve made it by covering swamps and waterways with homes, buildings, and roads. The old maps also show that many areas outside the central district which are now very much a part of Metro Cebu remained uninhabited precisely because they flooded easily.

In short, today’s worsening floods are part of a long history of altering, reclaiming, and covering Cebu’s waterways --likely compounded by decades of corruption, patronage-ridden flood control projects, and empty rhetoric about masterplans and what-have-you that have all failed to solve the problem.