Siquijor

The Island That Glows

Siquijor’s reputation precedes it: this small island in the Visayas — roughly an hour by fast ferry from Dumaguete — has been associated with folk magic, shamans, and healing traditions for so long that Filipinos from other islands sometimes still regard it with a complicated wariness. The older name for it was Isla del Fuego — Island of Fire — because the first Spanish sailors saw it at night lit by swarms of fireflies in the molave trees, which they interpreted as ominously as people in the sixteenth century tended to interpret things they didn’t understand.

What I found on arrival was an island that is quieter, greener, and more spatially generous than the surrounding Visayas. The main road circumnavigates the island in about ninety minutes by motorbike — I rented one from a shop in Siquijor town for three hundred pesos and spent the better part of two days on it. The interior is forested hill country, rarely visited, smelling of wet earth and something vaguely medicinal that I spent a while trying to identify and couldn’t.

Cambugahay Falls

The waterfalls at Cambugahay are a twenty-minute ride from Siquijor town and they are, at the risk of the word sounding exhausted, gorgeous. Three tiers of translucent blue-green water cascade down a limestone and vegetation face into a main pool that’s deep enough to jump into from the bamboo platforms someone has helpfully constructed at various heights. I swam for an hour in the middle pool — the water temperature somewhere between cool and cold, the surface lit by shafts of sun that made it look lit from below rather than above.

Rope swings are available and mandatory. The etiquette on the platform involves a queue of children who take the thing seriously, launch with commitment, and surface laughing every time. I swung twice and made it back to the platform once without too much ungainliness.

Healers and Folk Practice

Siquijor’s mananambal — traditional healers — are real, practising, and not difficult to find if you ask at your guesthouse with genuine curiosity rather than extractive tourism energy. Lia and I were directed to a woman named Manang Coring in a barangay outside Lazi who practices hilot massage and maintains an herb garden she uses for her treatments. The appointment cost three hundred pesos. She worked in silence for forty minutes with heated coconut oil and leaves I didn’t recognize, applied with a pressure that was neither comfortable nor unpleasant.

I won’t claim metaphysical effects. But the experience had a specificity and seriousness that made it feel nothing like spa tourism. Siquijor’s healing traditions are approximately four hundred years old and have survived through a combination of practical effectiveness and community faith. The herbs she used — bayabas, lagundi, sambong — are known to have medicinal properties. The ritual context around them is harder to quantify.

Salagdoong Beach and the Island’s Edges

The beach at Salagdoong, on the island’s east coast, has a striking feature: a cliff formation over the sea from which a set of wooden diving platforms have been built at various heights — five, eight, and ten meters. The water below is clear enough to see the bottom through a fathom of turquoise. I watched for a while before jumping from the five-meter level, which is high enough to make the three-second fall feel like a conversation with gravity.

The road around the island’s southeast edge passes through the old Spanish-era churches at Lazi and San Juan — Lazi’s convent is one of the largest in the Philippines, its stone walls thicker than my arm span.

When to go: March through June is ideal — dry, calm seas, full waterfalls from the preceding rains. The Holy Week healing ritual in April draws mananambal from across the island for a gathering market of herbs and potions. Avoid July through November for rough ferry crossings.