Vigan

I took the long night bus up from Manila to Vigan because Lia had read somewhere that it was the best-preserved Spanish colonial town in Asia, and I had assumed, with my usual reflexive cynicism, that this meant one restored street and a gift shop. I was wrong, which is always pleasant. We arrived bleary-eyed at dawn, walked into the old quarter, and found ourselves on a cobblestone street lined on both sides with two-storey merchant houses that had been standing, more or less unchanged, since the 1700s. No reconstruction, no theme-park veneer. The real thing, weathered and lived-in.

Calle Crisologo

The heart of it is Calle Crisologo, a pedestrian street of hardwood-and-stone houses built by the Chinese-Filipino traders who got rich on indigo and tobacco in the colonial centuries. The ground floors are stone, the upper floors are wood with capiz-shell window panels that glow when the light hits them, and the whole street is paved in cobbles that ruin your ankles and your luggage wheels in equal measure. By day it fills with calesas — horse-drawn carriages whose drivers will quote you a price, accept your counter-offer with theatrical reluctance, and then talk your ear off for the entire ride. We took one anyway. Lia named the horse Bernard. Bernard was unimpressed.

What struck me most was how genuinely inhabited it is. These aren’t museum houses with velvet ropes — people live in them, hang their laundry from the back balconies, run little shops and cafes out of the ground floors. The town survived the bombing of the Second World War almost untouched because the retreating Japanese garrison commander, by some accounts, chose not to torch it. Whatever the reason, it left the Philippines with something it has almost nowhere else: an intact pre-modern townscape, not rebuilt but simply never destroyed.

Beyond the postcard street

Step one block off Crisologo and the tourists evaporate. We wandered to Plaza Salcedo, where there is a slightly absurd dancing-fountain show at night that the entire town turns out for, and to the Vigan Cathedral, all thick earthquake-baroque buttresses and a bell tower set apart from the church in case it fell. The local food deserves a mention I rarely give: Vigan longganisa, a fat garlicky pork sausage, eaten at breakfast with a fried egg and sinful amounts of garlic rice, and empanada — a deep-fried orange pocket of grated papaya, longganisa, and a whole egg cracked inside before frying, sold from stalls around the plaza. I ate two and regretted nothing.

We also visited a burnay pottery workshop on the edge of town, where they still throw enormous earthenware jars on a wheel turned by foot and fire them in a brick kiln with a carabao trampling the clay beforehand. It is the kind of living craft that survives in exactly one or two places, and Vigan is one of them.

When to go: November through February for the cooler dry season. Vigan is a long haul from Manila — about nine hours by bus, or a short flight to nearby airports — so give it two nights. Walk Crisologo at both dawn and dusk; the crowds and the light are completely different, and the empty early morning is when the town feels most like itself.