Negros Oriental, for the fourth in our series on Philippine plazas. The town of Bacong is just south of Dumaguete, whose plaza we featured two weeks ago. It’s a fairly small town of just over 30,000 people but its plaza is large, well-maintained, and blessed with beautiful heritage buildings of note. Bacong, like most Visayan towns, is a coastal settlement. Established in 1801, the center of this 25- square-kilometer, 22-barangay municipality is a large seven-hectare civic and institutional block. This is anchored at its southwest corner by a sprawling plaza and town hall complex that covers an area of about two hectares. The plaza is framed today by the mature acacia and mahogany trees that line three sides, along with a glimpse of its elegant town hall on the plaza’s northeast quadrant. In earlier days, when the trees were smaller, this building and the much older town church beside the row of acacias would have been the defining elements of the space. The plaza is about a hundred meters wide by a little over a hundred meters deep. The frontage along the main road and the interior of the plaza is devoid of trees, allowing a full visual sweep of the area but also making it unusable during most of the day because of lack of shade. Only the edges are under the deep canopies of the majestic acacias. The plaza is host to three statues and a tennis court. The oldest statues are of Dr. Jose Rizal and Leon Kilat, the hometown hero and Visayan leader of the revolution. Both monuments were erected in 1926. The third monument, built in the ’70s, is a well-proportioned equestrian statue of a Katipunan officer leading a charge. Beautiful Bacong | Modern Living, Lifestyle Features, The Philippine Star | philstar.com
I believe that there is a strangler fig tree growing in front of the Barbershop. Someone told me they were a threatened species.