Rough Guide to Manila

People taking flights to Manila often confuse the City of Manila with the Manila Metropolitan Area. The Manila Metropolitan Area, containing over twenty million people, includes not only the City of Manila (the capital of the Philippines, with almost two million people), but also fifteen other cities: Ermita, Binondo, Malate, Intramuros, Pandacan, Paco, Sampaloc, Quiapo, San Miguel, San Andres, Santa Ana, San Nicolas, Tondo, Santa Mesa, and Santa Cruz. Each city, more like a neighborhood than a city, has its own character, whether commercial, historic, governmental, educational, religious, residential, political, or cosmopolitan, and all contribute to the overall culture of the entire Manila region.

One of the best-know landmarks is Rizal Park in the historic city of Intramuros — see if you can spot the crescent-shaped park from the air as you come in for a landing on one of the many flights to Manila . The park is dedicated to national hero JosÈ Rizal, who was executed by the Spanish during the rebellion of 1896. In the park you’ll find the Japanese and Chinese Gardens, the Butterfly Pavilion, a relief map of the entire Philippines, a children’s lagoon, a chess plaza, and the Manila Ocean Park, with many marine animals. The flagpole near the Rizal Monument shows the distances to many of the important places in the rest of the Phillippines.

The Manila Metropolitan Area seems to have no definable center, and that’s true. The cities of Quiapo and Binondo are quite energetic, with unique street markets, while Malate is the place to go find the nightlife. The neighborhood of Makati in the city of Manila, by contrast, is calm and orderly, and a wonderful place to relax, eat, drink, and shop.

In Quiapo, buy any type of electronics you can think of on Raon Street; the photography stores are on Felix R. Hidalgo Street. Binondo is the Chinatown of Manila; Paco is the Japanese town. You’ll find the universities in the cities of San Miguel and Santa Mesa.

Malate is a very popular tourist destination, with art galleries, antique shops, hotels, cafes, bars, restaurants, casinos, lounges, discotheques, and nightclubs. Zamboanga Restaurant on Adriatico Street, known for its fabulous seafood, is a family-owned restaurant serving customers continuously for the past thirty years — they host a cultural show every evening with dancers from all over the Philippines. Explore M.H. del Pilar Street and Mabini Street for nightlife that goes on all night. Go get something to eat in the upscale restaurants, such as the Korean Village, Larry’s Bar, and Cafe Adriatico, all along Remedios Street and Adriacto Street. Artists, both performing and visual, flock during their off-hours time, to the Penguin Bar near Remedios Circle.

People often see the region surrounding the bay as one huge mass, and not as a vast collection of individual cities and neighborhoods, each of which has its own flavor and character.Manila is more than a mere sum of these individual parts, it’s a multiplication of all those parts.

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