Philippines historical timeline

The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,641 islands, and its history is the history of who tried to hold them together. Three and a half centuries of Spanish rule left the churches, the surnames and the religion; four decades of American rule left the language of instruction, the legal system and the basketball. A traveller meets both layers within an hour of landing -- a baroque church at the end of a street named for a Spanish saint, with the paperwork inside conducted in English.

Chronology

1. 1521 Magellan's expedition lands on Homonhon Island, now part of Guiuan in Eastern Samar, on 16 March -- the first recorded European visit. He was killed shortly afterwards in a battle against Lapulapu, chief of Mactan, and both events are now commemorated on Cebu's doorstep, which is why the first stop on most Cebu itineraries is a monument to a Filipino victory.
2. 1565 The Manila galleon route opens, linking the Philippines to Mexico across the Pacific after the friar and navigator Andrés de Urdaneta pioneered the return passage. For 250 years Manila was the Asian end of a Spanish trade route to Acapulco, which is why Mexican words, foods and religious images are embedded in Filipino culture and why the capital sits on that particular bay.
3. 1815 The galleon route closes after 250 years in use. What it left is the deepest layer of the country a visitor meets -- the churches, the surnames, the fiestas -- and the reason the Philippines feels more Latin American than its neighbours.
4. 1898 Independence is proclaimed at Cavite el Viejo on 12 June, and ratified at Bacoor on 1 August. The date is the national holiday, and the proclamation site in Kawit is a museum -- but the independence it declared was not the one that followed.
5. 1898 The Treaty of Paris is signed on 10 December, under which Spain cedes the Philippine Islands to the United States in exchange for $20 million. That transfer is why the country's institutions are American-shaped while its churches and street names are Spanish.
6. 1899 The Philippine-American War begins on 4 February 1899 and its first phase runs to 4 July 1902, with the Moro Rebellion continuing from 1902 to 1913. This is the war that made American rule a fact rather than a treaty clause, and it is why the 1898 declaration of independence and actual independence are separated by 48 years.
7. 1942 Japan occupies the Philippines from 1942 to 1945, having invaded on 8 December 1941, ten hours after Pearl Harbor. The occupation and the campaign to end it are why the country carries so many war memorials and cemeteries, and why the capital a visitor sees is post-1945 almost throughout.
8. 1945 The Battle of Manila levels most of Intramuros, leaving only 5 per cent of the city's structures and destroying 40 per cent of the walls. It is the single most consequential date for what a visitor can see in the capital, and the reason the best Spanish colonial streetscape in the country is in Vigan rather than Manila.
9. 1946 Full independence takes effect on 4 July, the date set under the Tydings-McDuffie Act after almost eleven years of Commonwealth government. The handover was held on the steps of the Legislative Building in Manila, which now houses the National Museum of Fine Arts.
10. 1986 The People Power Revolution runs from 22 to 25 February, mostly in Metro Manila -- a sustained campaign of civil resistance that ended a twenty-year dictatorship and restored democracy without a battle. The EDSA shrine marks it, and the anniversary is still a public occasion.
11. 1991 Mount Pinatubo erupts, the second-largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century, with the climactic phase beginning at 13:42 on 15 June. Clark Air Base was ultimately abandoned by the United States because of it, and Subic Bay reverted to Philippine control in November 1992 -- which is how two of the largest American bases overseas became Philippine airports and freeports.
12. 1995 On 3 September a lahar buries San Guillermo Parish Church at Bacolor in Pampanga to half its height. Four years after the eruption, the mudflows were still arriving; the half-buried church is now the most direct thing a visitor can stand in front of to understand what a lahar is.
13. 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Yolanda, makes landfall in early November as one of the most intense tropical cyclones ever recorded, killing at least 6,300 people in the Visayas alone. Tacloban was struck by the northern eyewall and much of the city obliterated, with a storm surge reaching the second storey of the airport terminal. It is why so much of the infrastructure across the Visayas is post-2013.
14. 2017 The national mapping authority updates the island count from 7,107 to 7,641. It is a small entry with a practical consequence: guidebooks, tourist slogans and older signage carry the old number, and the newly counted islands are the kind a visitor will never reach.

What survived, and what did not

Manila is the great loss. The bombings of 1945 levelled most of the walled city of Intramuros, the Spanish administrative core, leaving only 5 per cent of its structures standing and destroying 40 per cent of the walls, and what a visitor walks through today is a mixture of survival, rebuilt wall and reconstruction. That single event is why the best-preserved Spanish colonial architecture in the country is not in the capital but in the places the fighting missed -- Vigan in the north above all, whose merchant houses are UNESCO-listed precisely because so little else of that streetscape survives anywhere.

The churches are the other survival story, and they survived by being built for earthquakes. The style now called Earthquake Baroque -- massively thick walls, low proportions, buttresses out of all apparent proportion to the building -- was shaped by limited materials and by the need to rebuild after fires and earthquakes, and four of these churches were inscribed together on the World Heritage List in 1993. They are the most durable Spanish legacy in the country in the literal sense: the engineering is why they are still standing.