The most isolated town in Batangas

In his 1895 survey Batangas y su Provincia, the Spanish official Manuel Sastron described Lobo as the most remarkably isolated town in the province. It could be reached only by narrow mountain trails that horses could barely pass, and the sea approach was dangerous because the town lay east of Matoco Point, outside Batangas Bay, on a coast known for heavy breakers. Its population was 6,700.

Sastron worked his way through the towns of Batangas and, coming to Lobo, opened by saying that of all of them this was the most remarkably isolated. He set its borders — San Juan to the east, Rosario and Taysan to the north, Batangas to the west, the sea to the south — and then explained why nobody went there.

The town sat on mountainous ground. The only land access was over narrow trails, and they were narrow enough that a horse could barely get through. Going by sea was no better. Lobo lies east of Matoco Point, which puts it outside the shelter of Batangas Bay, and the water off its shore was known for breakers big enough to make the crossing dangerous for small boats. Sastron gave the distance from Batangas town as seventy kilometres over difficult terrain. As the crow flies it is about twenty. The gap between those two numbers is the whole point: in 1895 there was no road.

His account of the people is worth carrying too, because it is unusually specific. He described the inhabitants as calm and unassertive, among the healthiest in the province, with crime rare, working in the industries the land allowed. The population late in the nineteenth century was 6,700 souls — against 41,251 today.

Read alongside the road under construction to Laiya, this is the throughline of Lobo's entire recorded history. The town has been three hours from everywhere for a hundred and fifty years, and every change in its fortunes has come from a change in how hard it is to reach. The current state of that approach is set out on how to get to Lobo.

The lineage of the town

Lobo was not always its own place. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, Rosario was a large town covering roughly a fifth of the province, and it shed parishes one after another: San Juan de Bolbok in 1846, separated as a town in 1848; Taysan a parish in 1860, independent from 1850, and it was Taysan that included Lobo. Lobo became a separate town in 1871, with its parish following two or three years later — sources give 1873 and 1874, and the discrepancy is published here rather than resolved silently.

There is a detail in that lineage worth its own paragraph. Rosario is thought to have begun as a Christian settlement on the coast of what is now Lobo. Pirate raids in the eighteenth century pushed the settlers inland, first to what is now Taysan and later to Padre Garcia. So the sequence runs: people settle the Lobo coast, pirates drive them into the interior, the interior town becomes Rosario, and Lobo is eventually carved back out of it. Gat Bahaghari building on a hilltop to watch for raiders, and Rosario fleeing inland from the same threat, are the same story a few centuries apart. The name Malabrigo — poor shelter — sits in the middle of it, and the lighthouse of 1896 takes its name from the same coast.

Related

The history of Lobo, Lobo before the Spanish, and Lobo in the Second World War.