Luzon historical timeline

Before European contact, Tagalog, Kapampangan and Pangasinan polities including Maynila, Tondo and Namayan controlled Luzon's coasts and river deltas, part of a wider Philippine archipelago shaped by Austronesian migration and trade connections to China, India and the wider region. In 1571, Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi, after defeating Maynila's last ruler, Rajah Sulayman, began building the walled city of Intramuros on the site, making Manila the capital of the Spanish East Indies -- administered first from Mexico City and, after Mexican independence in 1821, directly from Madrid. For nearly 250 years, Manila's galleon trade linked Asia directly to the Americas across the Pacific, one of the first truly global trade networks.

Spanish rule ended with the Philippine Revolution, launched by the secret society Katipunan under Andrés Bonifacio in 1896; the movement's most galvanizing moment was the execution of Filipino nationalist José Rizal at what is now Rizal Park on 30 December 1896. The United States took control after the 1898 Spanish-American War, and American colonial administrators founded Baguio as a hill station in 1900 -- the only one the United States ever built in Asia. World War II brought catastrophe to Manila: the month-long Battle of Manila in 1945 killed at least 100,000 civilians and left the city, alongside Berlin and Warsaw, among the most devastated capitals of the war, destroying much of Intramuros in the process. The Philippines formally gained independence on 4 July 1946, declared at Rizal Park, the same ground where Rizal had been executed fifty years before.