{
  "id": "manila",
  "title": "Manila",
  "lang": "en",
  "source_lang": "en",
  "summary": "Manila is the capital of the Philippines, a port city on Manila Bay whose history runs from pre-colonial trade through Spanish and American rule to modern metropolitan growth.",
  "category": "geography",
  "subcategory": "",
  "type": "place",
  "aliases": [
    "Maynila",
    "City of Manila",
    "Lungsod ng Maynila"
  ],
  "generated_at": "2026-10-09",
  "model": "pro/claude-haiku-5-5",
  "url": "https://aiwiki.page/en/manila/",
  "translations": {
    "zh-Hans": {
      "url": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/manila/",
      "json": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/manila.json"
    }
  },
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": "",
      "text": "Manila, officially the City of Manila, is the capital of the Philippines and the country's second most populous city after Quezon City. It sits on the eastern shore of Manila Bay on the island of Luzon, at the mouth of the Pasig River. Its importance rests on a long run of roles: a pre-colonial trading polity, the seat of Spanish rule in the Philippines, the western Pacific hub of the Manila galleon trade, and, today, the administrative and economic core of a metropolitan region of more than 20 million people. The entry treats the City of Manila as its primary subject, and keeps it distinct from Metro Manila (the National Capital Region), which is a separate administrative and statistical unit.\n\nThe entry follows the city's development in roughly chronological order, then turns to its present structure. It traces the origin of the name and the site's geography and climate, then covers the pre-colonial settlement, Spanish founding and the walled city of Intramuros, the galleon trade, the British occupation, the nineteenth-century transformation, and the American, Japanese and wartime periods. It then addresses the postwar return of the capital and the formation of the metropolitan region. The later sections describe government, demographics, economy, urban form, transport, culture, education, public health, and the planning and environmental challenges that face the city today, including flooding, land subsidence and sea-level rise.\n\nBecause Manila's history is closely tied to its port, river and bay, the entry gives particular attention to how geography shaped every stage of its development. It also notes where sources disagree, especially on early history and on metropolitan population figures, so that readers can see which numbers depend on how the metropolitan area is defined."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Name and origins of the name",
      "text": "Three forms of the name are in use, and each reflects a different stage of language contact. The Tagalog form is Maynila, and early and Spanish-period writing also used the longer form Maynilad. In the sixteenth century, Manila (then Maynilad) grew from an Islamic settlement on the banks of the Pasig River into the seat of the colonial government of Spain, so both forms were current when the Spanish administration arrived. The Spanish form Manila was the one that spread through European and later English usage. The city's formal designation in Filipino is Lungsod ng Maynila, \"City of Maynila,\" which returns to the Tagalog form. In English, the city is usually called Manila, and its residents are called Manileños (masculine) and Manileñas (feminine), a Spanish-derived pattern. Manilenyo is a Filipino-language spelling of the same demonym, and both forms appear in local usage.\n\nThe most widely repeated explanation of the name is a traditional etymology. It holds that Maynila comes from the Tagalog phrase may nilad, Tagalog for \"there is nilad,\" referring to the flowering mangrove plant that grew on the marshy shores of the bay. The plant is usually identified as Scyphiphora hydrophyllacea, a shrub associated with mangrove swamps, and was described as abundant along the riverbanks where the settlement stood. Local stories add a further detail: when residents were asked where flowers used for religious offerings came from, they reportedly answered \"sa may nilad\" (where the nilads are), and the phrase was later shortened. These accounts are oral and folkloric. One historical account notes that the nilad etymology is not ascribed to any historical source, so it should be treated as a traditional explanation rather than an established fact.\n\nOther proposals exist and are not fully resolved. One proposes that the name derives from \"maydila\" meaning it had a tongue, referring to its location near the mouth of the Pasig River. A historian, Gregorio Zaide, is cited as supporting a form of this argument. A second proposal links the name to indigo-yielding plants in the surrounding area. Scholars who favour this view note that the settlement was founded several centuries before indigo extraction became an important economic activity in the area in the eighteenth century, which weakens the link to the dye trade even if the plants themselves were present. Where the name's exact origin is concerned, the nilad explanation remains the most common, but the evidence for each proposal is limited, and the wording of the name's history should reflect that uncertainty."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Geography and site",
      "text": "Manila lies on the eastern shore of Manila Bay, an inlet of the South China Sea on the west coast of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines. The bay's sheltered waters, combined with the river mouth at its edge, gave the site its value as a port. Ships could anchor in relative shelter, and the river offered a route inland, which is why the settlement became a strategic trading point long before the city's modern growth. The city is partly ringed by hills and mountains to the east, but most of its built-up land occupies a swampy coastal plain. Published average elevations vary by source and mapping method, with figures from roughly 12 to 16 metres, so the most reliable description is that large parts of the city lie close to sea level.\n\nThe Pasig River is the city's central physical feature. It runs about 25 kilometres from Laguna de Bay, the largest lake in the Philippines, to Manila Bay, and it enters the bay inside the city limits. Its course runs roughly east to west, and it divides the city into northern and southern parts. Its main tributaries include the San Juan River, which forms part of the boundary between Manila and the neighbouring cities of San Juan and Mandaluyong, and a set of smaller channels, the esteros, that drain the city's interior. Because the river splits the urban area, crossings and bridges have long shaped how the two banks connect, while the waterfronts on either bank developed under different land-use pressures. The detailed history of these districts and bridges is treated elsewhere in the entry.\n\nAlmost all of the city rests on alluvial deposits laid down by the Pasig River over long periods, and a significant share of the coastal land is reclaimed from Manila Bay. Substantial land reclamation along the waterfronts took place from the early to mid-twentieth century, and human intervention has leveled some of the natural variations in the terrain. The broader coastal margin around the bay is a flat, low plain: ground elevation rises from zero metres at the shoreline to only a few metres in the inland parts of neighbouring cities. This flat relief, together with the esteros and the tidal reach of the river, means that drainage depends on engineered channels and outfalls rather than on natural gradients. The city's flood exposure, the subsidence of the ground and the policy responses are discussed in other sections.\n\nAdministratively, the City of Manila covers about 42.9 square kilometres (16.6 square miles) and is one of sixteen highly urbanized cities in the National Capital Region (NCR), which also includes the municipality of Pateros. The NCR was created by Presidential Decree No. 824 in November 1975 and was formalized as the NCR in 1978. Sources give the region's total area differently, with figures of about 636 square kilometres and about 620 square kilometres both in circulation, so the figure should be treated with care. The NCR lies between the neighbouring regions of Central Luzon, to the north, and Calabarzon, to the south and east, which contain Bulacan, Rizal, Laguna and Cavite. Manila is therefore the core of a wider Luzon urban region whose built-up area extends beyond the boundaries of the NCR, and whose growth and infrastructure are shaped by the same river systems and coastal plain that define the city itself. The city proper is thus a small administrative unit within a much larger, continuous settlement system, a relationship that became central to later planning in the metropolitan area."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Climate, hydrology and flood exposure",
      "text": "Manila has a tropical monsoon climate with two broad seasons rather than four. The dry season runs roughly from January to April, and the hottest months come just before the rains, in April and May. The wet season begins around May or June and is driven by the habagat, the southwest monsoon, which draws moist air from the South China Sea and the Pacific. Rain in this period usually falls as heavy, short downpours in the late afternoon or evening, though spells of several days of continuous rain also occur. Annual totals differ between sources because they depend on the station and averaging period. One climate summary gives about 1,750 mm a year, with July and August usually the wettest months.\n\nTyphoons add a second source of heavy rain. Manila lies within the Pacific typhoon belt, and the main risk period runs from about June to November, peaking in August and September. The city is often affected indirectly. A study by Ateneo de Manila University, the Manila Observatory, PAGASA and Japanese partners, using rainfall records from 1961 to 2022, found that on average about a third of southwest-monsoon rain on the western coast was enhanced by cyclones that never made landfall. These storms pull extra moisture into the monsoon flow, so the heaviest rain can arrive from systems hundreds of kilometres away.\n\nHow the causes interact\n\nFlooding in Manila is best understood as the result of several conditions coinciding. Rainfall supplies the water, but the city's ability to remove it depends on the capacity of its drainage network and on the level of the receiving water bodies. Manila Bay lies to the west and Laguna de Bay, the country's largest lake, to the southeast. Both can act as outlets, but when their levels are high, water in rivers and esteros cannot drain out, a process known as backflow. High tides and storm surges therefore reduce the outflow from the city even when rainfall is moderate. Riverine flooding from the Pasig and Marikina system adds a further pathway, since upstream rain can reach the lowland city hours later. A modest rainfall event at high tide can therefore produce more flooding than a heavier event at low tide, and when several of these pathways peak together, drainage capacity is quickly exceeded.\n\nLand use magnifies these effects. Paving and buildings reduce infiltration and send more runoff into streets and drains. A 2017 University of the Philippines study identified denser construction, concrete surfaces, clogged waterways, garbage in drains and building on former floodplains as key contributors, and some sites had drainage lines that appeared to have been covered over.\n\nHistorical drainage and land-use choices\n\nThe city's flood exposure has deep historical roots. Its low-lying site between the bay, the Pasig and a network of esteros predisposed it to flooding long before the colonial period. Spanish administrators founded Intramuros near the river mouth but depended largely on basic drainage canals, called zanjas, with little integration across the expanding city. Colonial officials noted that maintenance of the esteros declined, leading to siltation and blockage, and that settlement encroached on channels. During the American period, sanitation and drainage reforms were limited in scope, and periodic dredging became insufficient as urbanization accelerated. Early twentieth-century municipal records describe frequent knee-deep floods in districts such as Escolta, Santa Cruz and Sampaloc during the wet season. The historical pattern is one of drainage infrastructure designed for a smaller, less built-up city, with channels progressively narrowed or built over as the city grew.\n\nSubsidence and sea-level exposure\n\nGroundwater extraction is a second major factor. Metro Manila's water demand has been met in part by pumping from coastal aquifers, and InSAR satellite studies link ground deformation to areas of intensive extraction. One study reports line-of-sight subsidence of roughly 1 to 2 cm a year across Manila and neighbouring Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas and Valenzuela, apart from some coastal communities. Earlier work estimated that Manila subsided about 3 cm a year between 2003 and 2010, while a later analysis found more than 2 cm a year between 2015 and 2020, and some researchers suggest the rate has eased while warning that unregulated extraction could offset that gain. Natural autocompaction of deltaic sediments adds a smaller, slower component. The subsiding areas in Manila City are largely reclaimed land.\n\nFor comparison, sea level has risen by roughly 3 mm a year since 1993 according to IPCC estimates, so subsidence in parts of the city has been several times faster than global sea-level rise. The two processes compound each other: when land drops, the same tide reaches higher, drainage gradients shrink, backflow becomes more frequent, and storm surges penetrate further inland. Researchers differ on the relative contribution of subsidence and sea-level rise to worsening floods, and published rates vary by method, period and location, so the figures should be read as indicative rather than definitive."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Pre-colonial settlement and polities",
      "text": "The oldest dated document from the Philippines is the Laguna Copperplate Inscription. It is the earliest-known, extant, calendar-dated document found within the Philippines, and it records a debt release issued on 21 April, in the year 900 CE. Its text mixes Old Malay with Sanskrit loanwords. Antoon Postma placed the event in the Tagalog-speaking region around Manila, and the issuing authority was the chief of Tondo who issued the Laguna Copperplate Inscription to Namwaran's clan. The document is therefore evidence that organized polities existed around the bay by the early tenth century, but it does not describe a city in the modern sense.\n\nTwo neighboring polities occupied the Pasig River delta. Tondo lay on the northern part of the Pasig River delta, on Luzon island, while Maynila was built on the southern part of the Pasig River delta. Maynila was considered to be one of the most cosmopolitan of the early historic settlements on the Philippine archipelago and was fortified with a wooden palisade. Tondo's leaders, called lakan, were by the 1500s highly respected among the groups around Manila Bay, including Tondo, Maynila, and areas in Bulacan and Pampanga.\n\nThe founding dates of Maynila are uncertain. Estimates for the origins of the settlement range as early as the 1200s to the 1500s, and some traditions describe it as a Muslim settlement from the 1250s. By contrast, the oldest physical evidence of organized settlements dates back to the 1500s. A thirteenth-century fortified trading quarter near the river mouth is therefore best treated as a traditional or proposed chronology rather than a securely dated fact.\n\nMaritime trade was the basis of the region's wealth. Tondo established regular trade relations with the Ming dynasty in 1373, and together with Maynila, the polity shared a monopoly on the distribution of Chinese goods across the archipelago. Trade links also reached Japan, which referred to the region as Luzon, and Tondo's culture was shaped by exchanges with China, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Majapahit empire. Traders from Malaysia and Indonesia also helped spread Islam in the area, Islam was further strengthened by the arrival to the Philippines of traders and proselytizers from Malaysia and Indonesia.\n\nThe extent of Islamic influence and Bruneian involvement remains debated. Spanish records indicate that Sultan Bolkiah's influence had reached the Manila Bay region between 1485 and 1521. Some Bruneian oral histories describe a marriage between Bruneian and Manila royalty as a forced event brought upon the Manila polities by Bruneian leaders. A general history of the Philippines, by contrast, describes a marriage involving Rajah Salalila as placing Maynila under the influence of Brunei. Scholarly work that stresses local agency argues that the Luzones played a greater role in the maritime trade of Southeast Asia, and it questions whether conquest is the right frame. Because these accounts rest on different kinds of evidence, the entry presents Brunei's role as an open interpretive question."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Spanish founding and Intramuros",
      "text": "The Spanish colonial presence began in the central Philippines. Legazpi established the first Spanish settlement in the East Indies after his expedition crossed the Pacific Ocean, arriving in Cebu in 1565. The seat of government moved north to Manila in 1571, when the expedition was already governing from the Visayas. Sources give the founding date as 1571 but differ on the exact day. The Intramuros Administration's chronology lists the settlement's founding in 1571 on the site of the former kingdom of Rajah Soliman, while the Wikipedia infobox for the district gives June 12, 1571. Accounts of the early arrangements also describe a city council, consisting of two mayors, twelve councilors and a secretary, drawn up with native councils and local rulers, which suggests that the new administration initially combined Spanish and indigenous institutions.\n\nIntramuros, meaning \"within the walls\" in Spanish, was laid out on the south bank near the mouth of the Pasig River, and it became the core of colonial power. The name refers to the fortified city founded at the mouth of the Pasig River shortly after 1571. The first defences were built from perishable materials, and for years, Intramuros was only made of materials that were weak and were easily flammable. Typhoons and fire forced a shift to masonry, and the Spanish authorities later adopted a stone design. Construction of the walls and fortifications is generally dated from 1590 to 1825. The walls were built to protect the institutions and inhabitants therein, and their location reflected the threat from foreign powers. As the seat of Spain's authority in the archipelago, Intramuros drew the attention of every foreign power that sought to conquer the Philippines, including the Dutch and the British. Inside the walls, the colonial government was concentrated. Intramuros served as the seat of government of the Captaincy General of the Philippines, housing the colony's governor-general from its founding in 1571 until 1865, and the Real Audiencia remained there until the end of Spanish rule. The walled city also housed the palace of the Governor-General, the seat of the ecclesiastical hierarchy (the Archbishop's residence), government offices, military barracks, and the homes of Spanish elites.\n\nThe religious orders were central to life inside the walls. Intramuros became the religious heart of the Philippines, hosting the headquarters of major Catholic religious orders: Augustinians, Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, and Augustinian Recollects. Each order built magnificent churches and convents, turning Intramuros into a city of bells and spires. The ecclesiastical structure was formalized early: the Catholic diocese was established as a diocese by Pope Gregory XIII, 6 February 1579; and raised to the status of an archdiocese by Pope Clement VIII, 1595. The San Agustin Church, completed in 1607, is the best-known surviving example of this building program. Beyond the walls, the orders also shaped the wider colonial population. The Order of Saint Augustine, Society of Jesus, Order of Preachers, and Order of Friars Minor served as the primary agents of Western culture, and they led missionary efforts and converted local populations to Christianity.\n\nThe walls also shaped where other groups were placed, and this pattern set the spatial logic of later growth. Chinese residents were excluded from owning property inside the walls, so a growing community of Chinese-Filipinos were settled outside the walls in an area known as the Parian. The first Parián was built in 1581 and was located within the walls of Intramuros, but it was destroyed by fire and later moved to the edge of the walled city. Between 1581 and 1860, there were nine parians in Manila, always near the mouth of the Pasig River. The Chinese quarter of Binondo developed on the opposite bank of the river. The Spanish gave a land grant for Binondo to a group of Chinese merchants and artisans in perpetuity, tax-free and with limited self-governing privileges. Settlements of Chinese Catholics were also organized under religious orders, with the Dominicans supervising a community in Binondo and the Jesuits running another in Santa Cruz. Architecture reinforced these divisions as well. Spanish colonizers lived in elegant Bahay na Bato (stone houses) within the walls, while the colonized population lived in wooden structures outside. Sources differ on when the outlying suburbs were absorbed into the city: one describes them as independent towns that were only incorporated into the city of Manila during the early 20th century, while the Intramuros Administration dates their absorption to the late nineteenth century."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Manila galleon trade",
      "text": "The Manila galleons were Spanish sailing ships that made one round trip a year across the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco, in New Spain (present-day Mexico), from 1565 to 1815. Manila galleon, Spanish sailing vessel that made an annual round trip (one vessel per year) across the Pacific between Manila, in the Philippines, and Acapulco is the standard description. The route is often called a three-century trade, but its formal span was closer to two and a half centuries. Ships departed from Cavite, south of Manila, riding the southwest monsoon northward to reach the port of Acapulco, covering over ten thousand nautical miles and taking about six months. Goods that did not sell at Acapulco were carried overland to Veracruz and then shipped on to Seville. It is estimated that as much as one-third of the silver mined in New Spain and Peru went to the Far East.\n\nThe eastbound cargo was dominated by Chinese silk. Though Chinese silk was by far the most important cargo, other exotic goods, such as perfumes, porcelain, cotton fabric (from India), and precious stones, were also transshipped via the galleon. Spices, carpets and ivory from elsewhere in Asia were gathered in Manila and sent east in the same way. The Philippines itself contributed comparatively little to the cargo, and the route was tightly controlled by Spanish authorities. The trade was run as a monopoly, and Manila's role was mainly that of a transshipment point between Chinese producers and American buyers.\n\nThe price gap between the two sides of the Pacific drove the trade. A roll of silk, for example, was worth 10 times more in the Americas than in Manila. Merchants could expect high returns, and some estimates put them at anywhere from 150 to 200% profit on their investment. The Spanish Crown took a share of the revenue, as did the agents who brokered deals in port. Officially, the goods could only be sold in Mexico, but traders did re-export what they could get away with. Smuggling was common enough that inspections sometimes turned up concealed silver, as at Canton, where a search reportedly uncovered coins hidden in the ship's timbers and other places.\n\nThe trade's effects on local society were uneven. Manila's Spanish residents depended on the annual galleon for their income and for access to goods, and the city's economy was organized around the arrival and departure of ships. Chinese merchants and sojourning traders were among the main beneficiaries. Among those who profited were sojourning Chinese entrepreneurs and service providers. Chinese elites used the profits from silk exports to press for the reopening of maritime trade with the Philippines. Over time, Chinese and Asians became dependent on New World silver to conduct trade and accumulate wealth. Chinese merchants settled in and around Manila in large numbers, and their presence outside the walls of Intramuros became part of the city's multi-ethnic character.\n\nThe route declined from the late seventeenth century onward. Trade in American silver and Chinese silk was very lucrative and reached its height at the middle of the 17th century. However, in Spain there were worries about the rapid decline in the delivery of silver from the New World to Seville. Spain gradually loosened its restrictions, and the Manila galleons remained vital to Spain's trade within its empire until around 1785 when the Philippines were finally opened up to other European traders. The wars of Mexican independence then disrupted the Acapulco end of the route. Sources give different final dates, ranging from 1811 to 1815. In the early nineteenth century, the Manila Galleons continued regular journeys until the early 19th century, but then their cargo was destined to satisfy the American market for Chinese products.\n\nThe wrecks of the galleons are now a major source for historians and archaeologists. The San Diego sank in December 1600 after a battle with Dutch ships near Manila Bay. Franck Goddio and his team, in coordination with the National Museum and financially supported by Foundation Elf, conducted underwater explorations to find the San Diego. They discovered the wreck about 50 meters deep near Fortune Island, outside of Manila Bay. Among the finds were porcelain plates decorated with Spanish coats of arms and even Christian religious motifs, which show how the goods were adapted for overseas buyers. Other wrecks, such as the Santa Margarita, are less well documented, and accounts of where it sank differ between sources. Many wrecks were also damaged by salvage. Unfortunately treasure hunters have salvaged most of them and little information if any is accessible to researchers. Surveys of galleon wreck sites have since covered 641 square kilometers across multiple galleon sites. Their results are used to study shipbuilding practices and the exchange between Asia and the Spanish Empire."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Early modern attacks and British occupation",
      "text": "The first serious test of Manila's defenses came in November 1574, when the Chinese pirate Limahong led a fleet against the new Spanish city. <span></span>The fleet landed at Parañaque and assaulted the fortifications of Intramuros, and it was the first time the Spanish directly fought Japanese fighters, some of whom served in Limahong's force. Estimates of his strength vary widely, from several hundred to several thousand men. The defenders were a small Spanish force with Filipino and Mexican-born allies, and they repelled the attack, although the Spanish maestre de campo Martín de Goiti was killed. Spanish pursuit then carried the war north to Pangasinan, where Limahong was besieged for months before escaping. The attack also exposed local tensions: in the same period, revolts broke out in Tondo, Mindoro and Butas, and in the Manila-Tondo revolt residents looted the houses of Spaniards inside Intramuros. The lesson for the colonial government was that the walls had to be defended against enemies inside as well as outside.\n\nThe seventeenth century brought a different threat: Dutch naval operations aimed at Spain's supply lines to the Moluccas. Olivier van Noort entered Manila Bay in 1600, and on 14 December 1600 his squadron fought a Spanish fleet under Antonio de Morga near Fortune Island, where Morga's flagship sank. Later Dutch fleets attempted the same kind of pressure. In 1609 a Dutch force under François de Wittert was repelled by Governor Juan de Silva, and in 1616–1617 Joris van Spilbergen blockaded the entrance to Manila Bay before being defeated at the second Battle of Playa Honda. In 1646 a Dutch squadron of about eighteen ships met two galleons that had been hastily converted into warships, since Manila had few guns of its own at the time. The most significant engagement was the attack on Cavite in June 1647: twelve Dutch ships besieged the port that housed the galleons, and Spanish and Filipino defenders with artillery drove them off. These engagements shifted priorities toward naval defense at Cavite and the bay, not only the land walls.\n\nIn September 1762, during the Seven Years' War, a British expedition under William Draper and Samuel Cornish arrived in Manila Bay and attacked the capital directly rather than Cavite. <span></span>Artillery breached the walls within days, and a sally by Spanish troops and about a thousand Filipinos failed. The acting governor, Archbishop Manuel Rojo del Río y Vieyra, surrendered the citadel and the port of Cavite, and the city was promised a ransom of four million Mexican silver dollars. Britain then installed a civilian governor-general, Dawsonne Drake. Spanish authority did not vanish, however. Simón de Anda y Salazar, an oidor of the Audiencia, left the city before the surrender, set up a provisional government in Bulacan, and rejected Rojo's capitulation as illegal. This produced two rival centers of Spanish authority, one inside the walls under British control and one outside. The occupation lasted roughly eighteen months, from October 1762 to April 1764, according to most detailed accounts, though some sources describe it as about two years or twenty months. British aims centered on using Manila as an entrepôt for trade, particularly with China, and the British controlled little beyond the capital and Cavite, while some local groups rebelled in favor of the new rulers.\n\nThe city was returned to Spain under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, and Spanish rule was restored through that settlement and the reassertion of the Audiencia and the crown's officials. The occupation left several lasting effects. It showed that the walls could be breached by a modern naval and artillery force, which weakened their value as a deterrent and pushed the colonial government toward stronger seaward defenses. It also exposed the fragility of a single chain of command in a colony that depended on long, slow communication with Spain and Mexico. Finally, it demonstrated how divided loyalties within the colony, including the Chinese merchant community and Filipino elites, could affect the outcome of a foreign conquest."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Nineteenth-century transformation and nationalism",
      "text": "Trade and the reopening of the port\n\nThe city's economy changed in the early nineteenth century. The lucrative Galleon trade between Manila and Acapulco ended in 1815, and historians often connect that decline to Mexico's independence. Trade did not stop. A royal decree of 1834 revoked the privileges of the company and opened the port of Manila to trade, which allowed foreign merchants to work directly in the port. British firms were established in Manila by 1809, and their presence gave the city a commercial base that Spanish merchants had lacked.\n\nThe opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 added to these changes. The canal made direct commercial relations with Spain possible, so the Philippines no longer had to route trade through Mexico. Contemporaries also saw the canal as a source of new ideas, since newspapers, books, and magazines arrived from Europe and America more quickly. The export economy was built on agricultural crops. Sugar, tobacco, coffee and abaca became the main exports, and the growth of commercial agriculture produced a new class of landowners and merchants.\n\nUrban growth and the Chinese merchant economy\n\nGrowth went beyond the walls of Intramuros. Commercial activity clustered in districts outside the old walled core, and the Chinese merchant community played a central role. Some goods were controlled by a combination of the Spanish colonial government and Chinese merchants, and these monopolies fed the grievances that shaped reformist thinking. Binondo, founded for Chinese converts to Catholicism in the late sixteenth century, became the commercial heart of this economy, with its warehouses, shops and banks serving the export trade. Meanwhile, the colonial elite built promenades and townhouses that gave the city a more European look. One such thoroughfare, the Paseo de Maria Cristina, is now known as Bonifacio Drive.\n\nThe Ilustrados and the Propaganda Movement\n\nThe economic changes produced a new social group. By the 1870s, prosperous families were paying for their sons to be educated in Manila and Europe, and these young men became known as ilustrados, or \"enlightened ones.\" Many Ilustrados came from mestizo families who had gained wealth through commerce, and they were exposed to liberal ideas abroad. They were middle and upper class Filipinos who studied and lived in Europe and were exposed to liberal ideas.\n\nThe Propaganda Movement was their main political vehicle. It was a campaign by Filipino students and writers in Spain during the 1880s and 1890s to win reforms by peaceful means. Its goals were modest by later standards. The movement did not seek independence. It asked Spain to treat the Philippines as a province and Filipinos as Spanish citizens with equal rights. Among the movement's figures, José Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar and Graciano López Jaena are remembered as the three leading figures. Rizal's novel <i>Noli Me Tángere</i>, published in the mid-1880s (sources give 1886 or 1887), depicted the abuses of Spanish friars and colonial officials. Its critique of Manila's colonial society made it one of the most influential texts of the period.\n\nRise of the Katipunan and the Revolution\n\nReformist hopes faded. By 1892 it had become clear that Spain would not reform its colonial government. Andrés Bonifacio, a self-taught clerk, organized the secret society Katipunan in Manila. Membership reportedly reached about 100,000 by August 1896, when Spanish authorities discovered the organization. The Philippine Revolution began shortly afterwards. Rizal was in Manila Bay awaiting a ship to Spain when the revolt broke out, yet Spain held him responsible for it.\n\nRizal was returned to Manila in November 1896 and held at Fort Santiago, the colonial military prison at the mouth of the Pasig River. The court-martial was brief. The military trial opened on December 26, 1896, and ended on December 28. He was executed on December 30, 1896. The execution took place at Bagumbayan Field, an open ground facing Manila Bay that the colonial government used for public executions. That site is now Rizal Park. The execution had a lasting political effect: it united Filipinos against Spanish rule, and it turned Rizal into the central national hero of the Filipino nationalist tradition."
    },
    {
      "heading": "American colonial period and city planning",
      "text": "The United States took control of Manila in 1898 during the Spanish–American War, and the Treaty of Paris formally transferred the Philippines to American rule. The Philippine–American War followed. By 1901 the American administration had set up civil government, and the municipality of Manila was constituted from older parishes and districts, among them Binondo, Ermita, Intramuros, Malate, Quiapo, Santa Cruz and Tondo. The creation of Manila in 1901 is composed of the places and parishes of Binondo, Ermita, Intramuros, Malate, Manila, Pandacan, Quiapo, Sampaloc, San Andres, San Fernando de Dilao, San Miguel, San Nicolas, Santa Ana de Sapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Mesa and Tondo. This reorganization gave the city a single administrative frame for the first time under the new colonial order.\n\nThe most influential planning document of the period was the 1905 report on improvements for Manila. Its author, the American architect Daniel Burnham, had been brought in through William Howard Taft, the head of the civil government, and he worked with his associate Pierce Anderson during a visit in 1904–1905. The Burnham Plan of Manila is a popular name for the Report on proposed improvements at Manila and Manila, P.I., coauthored by Daniel Burnham and Pierce Anderson in 1905. The plan's approach drew on the City Beautiful movement, and its main idea was to tie the existing city into a wider network of avenues, parks and monuments. The Proposed Plan aimed to facilitate transport and communication throughout the city with a radial-concentric street network patterned after Washington D C and Paris. The proposals also included new districts, boulevards, parks, and harbor facilities. Burnham's team kept the walled Spanish core as the historic center. For the outer districts, the plan proposed developing waterfront areas with parks and parkways for public recreation, maintaining the historic walled city but adding gateways for traffic, and designing the outer districts with a fan-shaped street grid to facilitate transportation between sections.\n\nThe plan's civic core was located on the open land beside Intramuros. The site of the government centre was to be Luneta Park (Luneta translates to crescent shape, which was the park's original shape during the Spanish period, following the exterior curvature of Intramuros' walls). This area later became Rizal Park, named after the national hero José Rizal, and it remains the largest public park in the central city. The plan also proposed a monumental capitol modeled on the United States Capitol, with neoclassical government buildings grouped around it. The plan envisaged a bridge network that would join the north and south banks of the Pasig River, linking the walled city with the districts on the other side of the river. Parks were a recurring element: Burnham sought nine green areas that would not only beautify the city and provide shade from the tropical sun, but would also provide environments to permit social interaction.\n\nImplementation was slower and more partial than the report intended. The Philippine Commission formally adopted the Burnham plans for Manila and Baguio in May 1906. Parsons arrived at Manila in November 1905, tasked to \"interpret\" the preliminary plans prepared by Burnham and Anderson for Manila and Baguio, and modify these as needed. William E. Parsons, the supervising architect, oversaw most of the government buildings. Only part of the civic group was completed: Only the Agriculture and Finance Buildings were built of the original civic group. The National Library was also built in the 1920s but turned into the Legislative Building in lieu of the Capitol that could not get built because of budgetary cuts. Funds intended for the plan were also redirected to other projects, including an executive building at Malacañang Palace. Many historians argue that the plan was never fully carried out, yet its street layout and circulation patterns still shape the metropolis.\n\nBeyond the monumental plan, American rule brought public works and new civic institutions that modernized the city. These included improvements to port and harbor facilities, water and drainage works, and a public school system that expanded access to primary and secondary education in English. These projects, together with the parks and government buildings, gave Manila a more visibly modern and orderly appearance, while the planning effort also reflected the colonial assumption that a beautiful, orderly city would demonstrate American governance."
    },
    {
      "heading": "World War II and the Battle of Manila",
      "text": "Japanese troops entered Manila on 2 January 1942, only days after the city had been declared an open city. The occupiers merged the capital with neighbouring municipalities into the City of Greater Manila, and Jorge B. Vargas, a former executive secretary to President Quezon, was appointed its mayor. He also chaired the Philippine Executive Commission, a Filipino-staffed body under Japanese military control. Occupation headquarters were set up at the Manila Hotel, and Filipino elites ran much of the day-to-day administration. Food shortages and disease followed. Malnutrition and unsanitary conditions overwhelmed public hospitals in 1942 and 1943, and a flood in November 1943 cut food supplies from the provinces and made shortages worse. Around 4,000 Allied civilians were interned for most of the war, many at the University of Santo Tomas.\n\nThe battle, February–March 1945\n\nAmerican and Filipino forces began their assault on the city on 3 February 1945. Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji disregarded orders to withdraw and used roughly 18,000 men, mostly naval personnel, to hold the city block by block and house by house. As the American units closed in, the Japanese forces blew up the bridges over the Pasig River and set fire to densely built residential areas. General Douglas MacArthur had initially restricted air strikes and heavy artillery in an effort to spare the city. When the defenders proved unwilling to surrender, however, tanks, tank destroyers and howitzers were used against stone strongpoints, and the fighting intensified. The most heavily damaged areas included Intramuros, the government buildings beside it, and the districts of Malate, Ermita and Paco.\n\nCivilian deaths were the largest human cost. Historians generally put the number of Filipino civilians killed at no fewer than 100,000, and some estimates reach 240,000. Many were killed in massacres by Japanese troops in residential areas, churches, schools, hospitals and detention sites, and some were used as human shields. Others died in American artillery fire. Estimates of the share attributable to each side differ, and the attribution remains contested in historical writing. American military losses were 1,010 killed, and Japanese losses were around 16,000 in and around the city.\n\nDestruction of the built city\n\nThe physical damage was extensive. Accounts report that more than 600 city blocks were flattened, that about 70 percent of the city was destroyed and that the business district was almost entirely lost. Utilities and factories were heavily damaged. The destruction also erased much of the architectural and cultural heritage that had survived since the Spanish period, including historic churches and colonial-era buildings in the walled city. The loss changed the built fabric of the core districts, and reconstruction later took place on a much altered urban grid.\n\nLiberation, reconstruction and independence\n\nJapan's formal surrender came on 2 September 1945, although fighting continued in other parts of the archipelago until the summer of that year. The United States and the Philippines signed the Treaty of Manila on 4 July 1946, which recognized Philippine independence. Reconstruction in the immediate postwar years had to address destroyed housing, damaged port and river infrastructure, dispersed households and wartime deaths. The city's administrative position also changed. Greater Manila was dissolved, and Quezon City regained its separate status in January 1947. It became the national capital in 1948, a role it kept until 1976, which shifted the centre of national government away from the old colonial core.\n\nThe war thus marks a major break in the city's history. It ended the pre-war colonial and commercial city, displaced and killed a large part of its population, and redirected its political role. Later reconstruction and planning took place within a new national state, and the wartime losses shaped how the city's historic districts were understood afterward."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Capital status and formation of Metro Manila",
      "text": "After independence, the national capital was moved away from Manila for a period. Republic Act 333, passed in July 1948, made Quezon City, a city that Manuel L. Quezon had founded in 1939, the new capital in place of Manila When Quezon City was created under Commonwealth Act No. 502, which was signed by President Manuel L. Quezon on Oct. 12, 1939. Government departments relocated there, and the capital was formally inaugurated in October 1949 It was officially proclaimed the national capital on October 12, 1949, and several government departments and institutions moved out of Manila and settled into the new capital city.\n\nQuezon City's role ended in 1976. On May 29, 1976, then President Ferdinand E. Marcos issued Presidential Decree No. 940 restoring Manila as the national capital and reverting QC to its original status as a city created in honor of its late founder. The decree took effect on 24 June, coinciding with the celebration of Manila's 405th anniversary. The justification cited the city's long role as the seat of government since the Spanish period owing to its historical significance as the almost uninterrupted seat of government of the Philippines since the Spanish colonial period.\n\nThe metropolitan framework was created separately. Presidential Decree 824 was issued on November 7, 1975, after the residents of the affected cities and municipalities approved the creation of Metro Manila in a referendum held on February 27, 1975. It consolidated the Philippine capital Manila and adjacent Quezon City with two cities and twelve municipalities of the province of Rizal and one municipality of the province of Bulacan. At its creation the region had four cities, Manila, Quezon City, Caloocan, Pasay and the thirteen municipalities, and most of those municipalities later became independent cities, leaving Pateros as the only municipality At present, all but one of these municipalities have become independent chartered cities; only Pateros still remains as a municipality. Presidential Decree 1396 of June 1978 then gave the area its formal designation as the National Capital Region On June 2, 1978, through Presidential Decree No. 1396, the metropolitan area was declared the National Capital Region of the Philippines.\n\nThe new structure changed the balance of power between the City of Manila and its neighbors. The Metro Manila Commission served as the region's central authority, and its head was an appointed post. The head of the commission was a governor, an appointive position rather than an elected one. Marcos appointed his wife Imelda Marcos as the MMC Governor. A 1985 study in the Philippine Journal of Public Administration argued that the decree provided the MMC with the exclusive power to perform executive, policy-making and general administrative functions, which meant the de facto suspension of the hitherto existing vertical and horizontal separation of powers in metropolitan politics. Before this change, local governments had primarily served as power bases for rival national and local politicians. The Commission was replaced in 1990 by the Metro Manila Authority, which was later succeeded by the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA). Sources describe the MMDA's role differently. One describes it as an advisory body to the local government units of the National Capital Region. Another lists it as the managing entity of the region Managing entity: Metropolitan Manila Development Authority. Within the region, the four original cities also served as district centers, with the city-district of Manila (Capital District), Quezon City (Eastern Manila), Caloocan (Northern Manila, also informally known as Camanava), and Pasay (Southern Manila).\n\nThe administrative boundaries of the region do not match the built-up urban area. The National Capital Region currently composed of: 16 cities Caloocan; Las Piñas; Makati; Malabon; Mandaluyong; Manila; Marikina; Muntinlupa; Navotas; Parañaque; Pasay; Pasig; Quezon City; San Juan; Taguig; Valenzuela; 1 municipality Pateros. The City of Manila is one of these units and covers only a small part of the region's territory. Quezon City alone accounts for one-third of Metro Manila's total land area. Beyond the regional boundary, Greater Manila, the contiguous urbanized region surrounding the metropolis, is the fourth largest ASEAN country subdivision by GDP. For this reason, figures for the City of Manila, the National Capital Region and Greater Manila measure different territories and are not directly comparable."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Government and administration",
      "text": "Manila is classified as a highly urbanized city. Under the Local Government Code of 1991, cities fall into three categories: highly urbanized cities, independent component cities, and component cities. Highly urbanized status requires a minimum population and a minimum annual income, as certified by national and city authorities. The city's status dates from December 22, 1979. Because highly urbanized cities are independent of the province, Manila's council and mayor answer directly to national law rather than to a provincial governor. Its ordinances must also be posted and, in highly urbanized cities, published in a local newspaper.\n\nThe city has a separate executive and legislative branch. Local officials serve three-year terms. The city mayor is restricted to three consecutive terms (nine years), although he can be elected again after an interruption of one term. The legislature is the Sangguniang Panlungsod. It is composed of 38 councilors, with 36 councilors elected from Manila's six councilor districts, which coincide with the legislative districts, and two councilors elected from the ranks of barangay chairmen and the Sangguniang Kabataan. The vice mayor, elected citywide, presides over the council. The mayor can veto council measures, but the council can override the veto with a two-thirds supermajority.\n\nThe smallest unit of government is the barangay. The city is divided into 897 barangays, each with its own chairperson and councilors. More than half of the barangays in Metro Manila are located in the City of Manila, which has 897 of them. One source attributes the disproportion to population growth, especially in the suburbs of Manila, which has left the older city with many small local units. For administrative purposes, the barangays are grouped into zones and further into administrative districts, and these zones and districts have no form of local government. Electoral districts and administrative zones are therefore separate systems, and residents elect officials only at the barangay and city levels.\n\nManila's role as the seat of government adds a further layer. The presidential palace at Malacañang and the Supreme Court are located in the city, and many national agencies have offices there. The national legislature, however, meets in Quezon City, so the national capital function is split between the two cities.\n\nManila is also part of a metropolitan framework. Metro Manila is recognized in law as a \"special development and administrative region,\" and was thus given a metropolitan authority. The region's 17 local government units include sixteen cities and one municipality. The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority was established through Republic Act 7924 to harmonize administration in the region. Its responsibilities include development planning, transport and traffic management, solid waste management, flood control, urban development, and public safety. Its chairperson is appointed by the president of the Philippines and is also the presiding officer of the Metro Manila Council. That council is the agency's governing board and includes representatives from the member cities.\n\nThe division of powers affects how services are delivered. The agency sets the policies concerning traffic in Metropolitan Manila, and it operates a single ticketing system for traffic violations across the region. Yet the agency is expected to respect local autonomy. In executing its mandate, the agency wields regulatory and supervisory authority over the delivery of metro-wide services, all while respecting the autonomy of local government units in matters exclusive to their jurisdictions. Where it provides basic services to local units, this requires prior coordination and consent. As a result, responsibility for a single problem, such as flooding, garbage collection or traffic, can be divided among the city, its barangays and the metropolitan agency. Coordination across these levels, rather than a single chain of command, determines how quickly services and enforcement are adjusted."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Demographics and population",
      "text": "The 2024 census returned 1,902,590 residents for the City of Manila, which places it second among Philippine cities behind Quezon City, which had 3.08 million. The city's density is about 44,936 people per square kilometer, and it had 486,293 households (Manila's infobox, based on the 2024 census). Dividing the population by the household count gives roughly 3.9 persons per household, a derived figure rather than one the census reports directly.\n\nThe census series shows a city whose share of the metropolitan population has shrunk. Counts ran from 1,601,234 in 1990 to 1,581,082 in 2000, then rose to 1,652,171 in 2010, 1,780,148 in 2015, 1,846,513 in 2020 and 1,902,590 in 2024 (Philippine census tables for Metro Manila's cities). The 1990–2000 decline is the only fall in the series, and the fastest intercensal gain came between 2010 and 2015, when the count rose by roughly 7.7 percent. Over 2020–2024 the city grew by 3.04 percent in the 2024 census comparison table, while the National Capital Region grew by 0.91 percent annually on average during the period 2020 to 2024. The region totalled 14,001,751 as of 2024. By these figures the city's share of the region fell from about 20 percent in 1990 to about 13.6 percent in 2024, which indicates that much of the metropolitan growth has taken place in neighboring cities rather than within the city's own boundaries. The same pattern is common in other large metropolitan areas, where millions of migrants from other parts of the nation have settled in the wider region.\n\nThe 2024 age table records 493,908 residents aged 0–14, 1,249,977 aged 15–64 and 93,900 aged 65 and over (City Population, Manila 2024 structure data). Children therefore make up roughly 26 percent of the population, working-age adults about 66 percent and older residents under 5 percent. The largest ten-year group is 20–29, with 356,847 people. A concentration of young adults on this scale suggests that in-migration of working-age people has been significant, though the census tables alone do not establish the cause. The same table shows 924,982 women and 912,803 men, a near-balanced sex ratio.\n\nPopulation totals for the wider area depend heavily on definition. The city proper has about 1.9 million residents, while the National Capital Region, which includes sixteen highly urbanized cities and one municipality, had 14.0 million in 2024 The NCR is composed of 16 highly urbanized cities (HUCs), one municipality, and 1,715 barangays.. The built-up urban area is listed at about 13.48 million in one source, a figure that differs from the 2020 regional count of 13,484,462 by only twenty people The NCR population on May 1, 2020 was 13,484,462. This closeness suggests that some \"urban\" figures may reuse administrative counts rather than measuring a physically built-up area independently. Other sources give much larger totals: one lists an urban figure of 24,922,000 and a metro figure of 30,785,176 for the Greater Manila Area Greater Manila Area population figures, which includes the neighboring provinces of Bulacan to the north, Cavite and Laguna to the south, and Rizal to the east. A 2021 estimate from Demographia puts the built-up urban area at 24.0 million, covering 873 square kilometers. A United Nations figure of 14.2 million refers to the National Capital Region rather than the built-up area United Nations figure is for the National Capital Region, which is also referred to as Metro Manila.. Any trend or comparison therefore needs a stated boundary.\n\nThe population also reflects the city's long multi-ethnic history. Tagalog is listed as the native language Native languages: Tagalog (Filipino), and the city has attracted migrants from other regions, while its long-established Chinese-Filipino community, traced in the historical sections, remains part of its social makeup."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Economy, port and labor",
      "text": "Manila's economy is organized around services rather than heavy industry. Official statistics put the city's output for 2025 at about 1.06 trillion pesos, which made it the third-largest city economy in the Philippines, behind Quezon City and Makati. The city's economy grew by 1.9 percent in 2025, slower than the 5.4 percent growth recorded in 2024. Output splits roughly 3.4 to one between services (77.4 percent) and industry (22.6 percent). Wholesale and retail trade, including vehicle repair, is the largest sector at 22 percent, ahead of manufacturing at 18.5 percent and public administration and defense at 15.4 percent. Public administration and defense made the biggest contribution to Manila's economic growth at 0.5 percentage points in 2025. This reflects the concentration of national institutions in the city, which is discussed under government.\n\nManila's share of the wider economy is substantial but smaller than the metropolitan total. Manila accounted for about 14.6 percent of the National Capital Region's economy in 2025. The region as a whole is far larger, and one estimate places it at 36% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Philippines. Earlier APEC figures gave a slightly higher share. Regional data show the same pattern of dominance by services, which made up 82.9% of the total regional GDP in 2024. The city's economy is therefore one part of a metropolitan labor and production system in which many workers commute in from neighboring areas. Between 2000 and 2010, daytime population in Metro Manila increased from 13 million to 16 million, as residents of adjacent provinces sought work there.\n\nThe port is one of the main reasons for the city's economic weight. The port complex comprises three principal facilities: the North Harbor, which handles mainly domestic cargo; the South Harbor, which handles international cargo; and the Manila International Container Terminal (MICT), which focuses on containers. The MICT is the Philippines' largest international container terminal in terms of volume and capacity, capturing an estimated 65 percent market share in the Port of Manila. Private operators run several of these facilities under concession agreements. The North Harbor, for example, is run by a company held 50 percent by International Container Terminal Services, Inc. (ICTSI), under a 25-year concession contract with the Philippine Ports Authority (PPA). Container volumes reported in different sources diverge. A port reference cites about 4.5 million TEU for 2016, while a port guide estimates roughly 5.5 million TEU for 2024, so the figures should be read as approximate.\n\nThe informal economy is a large part of the city's labor market and sits alongside the formal sector described above. One account of the city estimates that the informal economy employs nearly half of the city's residents, from shoe vendors to domestic employees. Street vending is the most visible part of this sector. Researchers have found that vendors can make up up to half the urban workforce in cities like Manila, yet no accurate statistics on street vendors are available. Most vending is not recognized in planning. Official planning documents do not include informal trading activities, partly because state rules consider street vending illegal. Enforcement has been episodic. Soon after taking office in 2019, the mayor cleared streets in Divisoria and other areas of illegal vendors. Studies of vendors emphasize that they remain crucial stakeholders of the informal economy as their existence fills a need for the minimum-income working class.\n\nPoverty persists alongside this economic activity, and the measures used to describe it give different pictures. The official regional poverty incidence for Metro Manila in 2025 is listed as 0.6%, which is low compared with the national rate. Income-based measures of this kind, however, do not capture the insecurity of informal work, such as unstable earnings, lack of legal protection and exposure to clearance operations. Vendors may dodge tax payment, but this also leaves them without legal protection.\n\nMunicipal revenue is a constraint on what the city can provide. City finances rest on local taxes and fees, together with a share of national tax collections transferred to local government units under the Local Government Code of 1991. Because the local tax base is closely tied to property, commerce and formal employment, a large informal sector narrows that base, while the city still carries high service demands from a dense and mobile population. Revenue limits therefore shape how far the city can invest in roads, drainage, housing and other infrastructure, a point that links back to the fiscal arrangements of the metropolitan area as a whole."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Urban form and districts",
      "text": "Manila's built form reflects its layering of Spanish, Chinese, American and postwar development along the Pasig River. The walled quarter of Intramuros on the river's southern bank is the clearest survival of the colonial plan. Its central plaza mayor functions as the organizing core of the street grid, and the walls and churches around it still set the scale of the historic zone. World War II wiped out much of Manila's historical architecture, so the surviving fabric is patchy, and much of what visitors see today is later reconstruction or a restoration of older forms.\n\nAcross the river, Binondo has a different origin. Spanish authorities moved the Chinese settlement several times before fixing it in place: first settling on Isla de Binondoc in 1573, then moving across the Pasig River to settle beside Intramuros, then relocated by the Spanish back to Binondoc, and finally becoming established in Binondoc as the world's oldest established Chinatown in 1594. The location was deliberate. Colonial officials could keep a close eye on their migrant subjects from the other side of the river while still drawing on their labor and trade. Over four centuries the district became a dense commercial corridor marked by family enterprises, wholesale markets, banking institutions and specialty retail. Its church, rebuilt after wartime damage, and the adjacent plaza anchor a religious and commercial core, and Ongpin Street remains its most recognizable commercial artery. Financial activity has since moved toward Makati and Bonifacio Global City, leaving Binondo an important commercial center, particularly for wholesale trade and small businesses.\n\nOther districts\n\nThe river divides the city into two broad halves. North of the Pasig River lie Binondo, Quiapo, Sampaloc, San Miguel, Santa Cruz, Santa Mesa and Tondo, while the south bank includes Ermita, Intramuros, Malate, Paco, Pandacan, Port Area and other districts. The city now has 16 districts, and several of the larger ones are split into more than one postal zone. These districts differ in character. Tondo is the densest in terms of population, the largest in land area and also with the highest poverty level, according to one source, and its streets and esteros have long been associated with migrant settlement and poverty. Quiapo has a sizable Muslim population in Manila, and The Golden Mosque is located there. Ermita and Malate form the main tourist and nightlife belt, with establishments resembling the Western version of a pub concentrated in Remedios Circle in Malate. Malate and Ermita also sit inside the informal University Belt, the cluster of higher education institutions that gives those districts a student population. The Port Area, by contrast, is organized around port works, as the South Harbor and its piers show.\n\nParks and public space\n\nRizal Park, also known as Luneta, sits at the edge of Ermita next to Intramuros and gives the city one of its main civic open spaces. The site was a marshy patch of land next to the beach when the Spanish completed a promenade there in 1820. Earlier, a small community called Bagumbayan stood on the same ground, and this town was cleared out after the British briefly took over Manila from 1762 to 1764, according to one account. The park is best known as the place where Rizal was executed in front of the Filipino crowd and shot to death by the firing squad in 1896. Its naming history is recorded differently across sources: one states that the park was renamed as Rizal Park in 1913, while another notes a later formal change to \"Rizal Park Luneta\" in December 2021. The park's roughly 58 hectares make it one of the largest urban parks in the Philippines.\n\nContrasts within the city\n\nThe city's form combines three distinct patterns that sit side by side. Dense historic districts such as Intramuros and Binondo are compact, walkable and rich in older buildings, though much of their architecture is post-war. Commercial corridors, such as Ongpin Street and the Malate nightlife streets, concentrate retail, food and services in narrow frontages. Informal settlements, especially in Tondo and along waterways, follow a different logic, with high densities and limited space for public facilities. Guidebooks commonly note that the so-called tourist areas can feel a bit gritty and chaotic, which reflects how these three patterns overlap at street level."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Transport and infrastructure",
      "text": "Rail transit\n\nManila's rail system is a set of separate lines run by different operators rather than a single integrated network. The best-known is MRT Line 3, an elevated line that follows EDSA. Its 13 stations are spread across five cities, giving the line a north–south span of 16.9 km ([6-3]). The corridor first appeared in a 1973 study that proposed five subway lines for the metropolitan area. The Line 3 project was later re-scoped as a light rail project in 1989 ([2-7], [2-9], [2-11]). The line is busy, averaging about 392,000 passengers a day in 2025 ([6-4]). Its operating arrangement changed recently: the 25-year build-lease-transfer agreement under which the original contractor ran the line expired in July 2025, and the Department of Transportation took over operations ([3-3], [6-9]).\n\nLRT Line 1 runs through Pasay, Manila and Valenzuela ([4-1]). Transfers between lines are possible at a few points, such as EDSA, where a covered walkway links the MRT and LRT stations ([8-12]). Because the lines were built at different times by different operators, fares, ticketing and transfer options vary, and riders often need to combine rail with road-based transport to complete a trip. Jeepneys, buses and tricycles fill most of the gaps in the network. Jeepneys are the most common form of informal public transport, running on fixed routes but with flexible stops.\n\nRoads and traffic\n\nEDSA is described as the region's busiest road corridor ([2-9]), and congestion there is a daily feature of life in the city. The causes are structural rather than a single failure. Vehicle ownership has grown faster than road space. Many streets in the older districts are narrow and were laid out before motor traffic. Jeepneys and buses stop in traffic lanes to load passengers, and freight trucks use the same streets as private cars. The long delay in building a mass transit network meant that road space carried most of the demand for decades.\n\nThe main policy responses have included traffic-management schemes run by the Metro Manila Development Authority, such as number coding, which restricts vehicles on particular days, along with road widening, bus lanes and the expansion of rail lines. Each measure has had a limited effect on its own, because the underlying gap between trip demand and capacity remains large.\n\nWater and sewerage\n\nWater supply and sewerage are provided by private concessionaires under contracts with the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System, not by a single public utility. Maynilad Water Services serves the West Zone, and its concession covers most of the city of Manila, except portions of San Andres and Santa Ana ([10-1]). The original 25-year concession was granted in 1997 ([10-4]). Early on, tariffs were fixed until 2003, the revenue assumptions proved too optimistic, and the Asian financial crisis's currency effects pushed both concessions into financial difficulty, after which tariff increases were approved ([16-6], [16-7]). A 2009 board resolution extended the concession to 2037, but that extension was later revoked ([17-3], [17-5]). A 2021 law granted Maynilad a new 25-year franchise ([14-2]). Maynilad reported that 94.7% of the West Zone was connected to piped water by March 2025, up from 77.8% in 2006 ([12-2], [12-3]).\n\nThe arrangement has clear consequences. Tariffs, investment and service standards depend on contract terms that have been renegotiated, and the state has faced claims. An arbitration panel in Singapore ordered the government to pay the two concessionaires for losses linked to unimplemented rate increases ([17-9]). The concessionaires bill end users directly ([14-4]), and the regulator monitors their performance against contractual obligations ([13-5]).\n\nElectricity\n\nElectricity distribution is handled by Manila Electric Company (Meralco), which is the sole electric power distributor in Metro Manila ([25-2]). It is the largest private sector distribution utility in the country and operates under a 25-year congressional franchise ([22-1], [22-2], [22-3]). Sources give different customer counts: one reports 6.3 million customers across its franchise area of 9,685 km² ([22-4]), while another reports more than 8 million ([19-5]). Meralco also develops generation plants through a subsidiary ([22-8]).\n\nThe implications are that households and firms in the metropolitan core have no choice of distributor. Service reliability, network investment and pricing therefore depend on the franchise terms and on regulatory oversight, rather than on competition between distributors.\n\nBridges and the river\n\nThe Pasig River divides the city into northern and southern parts, so bridges have long determined how the two sides connect for traffic and transit. Crossings concentrate traffic at a limited number of points, which adds to congestion in the central districts. Successive rehabilitation programmes have aimed to clean the river and restore its banks and waterfronts, but progress has been partial, and the river's water quality remains a problem. Bridge and river works therefore form an ongoing part of the city's infrastructure history rather than a finished project."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Culture, religion and heritage",
      "text": "Catholic devotion and the Feast of the Black Nazarene\n\nRoman Catholicism is the dominant faith in the city, and its religious life is most visible in the calendar of processions and feasts. The most prominent of these is the Feast of the Black Nazarene. The commemoration is a devotional Catholic event originating in Manila, and centers on a 16th-century image of a black Jesus carrying the cross, which is carried in a mass procession. The image was brought to the islands by the Augustinian Recollects in 1606 and was moved to Quiapo Church in 1787 at the request of the archbishop of Manila. It was first enshrined in the church of San Juan Bautista in Bagumbayan, and was later transferred to the church of Quiapo.\n\nThe annual procession, called the Traslación, takes place on January 9. Devotees walk the route barefoot and wave white towels in the air, a gesture linked to penance and to the suffering of Christ, and members of the Hijos del Señor Nazareno wipe the image with cloths that are then thrown back to the crowd. The scale of attendance is large and the figures differ by source. For the 2026 feast, one report described more than 9.6 million Catholics taking part, while another gave just under 10 million people for the period from late December to January 10. The 2026 procession also ran far longer than usual, lasting 30 hours, 50 minutes, and 1 second, according to police, compared with 20 hours and 45 minutes the previous year. Since the feast draws so many people, its organization requires extensive coordination among church authorities, local governments, medical services, and thousands of volunteers.\n\nOther Catholic observances are also central to the city's identity. The Manila Cathedral, officially the Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, hosts the annual Grand Marian Procession as part of the celebration of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Parish fiestas, Holy Week processions and novena devotions are held across the city's districts, and they link religious practice with neighborhood identity.\n\nMuslim and Chinese-Filipino communities\n\nManila is also home to Muslim and Chinese-Filipino communities whose religious and cultural practices shape parts of the urban landscape. Muslim residents, many of them migrants from Mindanao and other southern provinces, live in several districts, and Quiapo has a notable Islamic presence, including a mosque near the old commercial core. The Islamic tradition in the city is therefore visible in architecture and in the calendar of observances such as Ramadan and Eid, though these communities are much smaller than the Catholic majority.\n\nChinese-Filipino communities have a long presence in the city, and Binondo, one of the oldest Chinatowns in the world, has temples, clan associations and festivals tied to the lunar calendar and the Lunar New Year. The shops, Chinese-language signage and temple architecture of this district form a distinct cultural layer within the city, and they are discussed further in the section on urban districts.\n\nHistoric churches, colonial architecture and heritage\n\nHeritage is a major part of the city's identity. Within the walled city of Intramuros, the Spanish built a series of churches that combined European forms with local materials. San Agustín Church, completed in 1607 after 44 years of construction, stands as the crown jewel. It is one of only four Baroque Churches of the Philippines inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The other churches of the walled city were largely lost, and their destruction in 1945 represents not merely loss of buildings but erasure of centuries of spiritual and artistic tradition. Their reconstruction, and the restoration of the surviving fabric, became part of the postwar effort to rebuild the district. In 1951, Intramuros was declared a historical monument, and it was designated a National Historical Landmark in the same period.\n\nManagement of the historic core has been carried out largely through the Intramuros Administration, which was created in 1979 through Presidential Decree 1616. Its work includes the reconstruction of the San Ignacio Church, where excavations began in the same period. About 500 artifacts were discovered on the site, and the site became a museum complex.\n\nMuseums and national memory\n\nMuseums in the walled city present the colonial and religious past. The Museo de Intramuros occupies the former San Ignacio Church and the Mission House of the Society of Jesus. Its collection is mainly ecclesiastical and includes ecclesiastical art, furniture, vestments, and textiles and other artifacts. Nearby, Casa Manila is a reconstructed bahay na bato filled with the furniture, knick knacks, and equipment found in a rich person's house at the later part of the Spanish colonial era. A later addition, the Centro de Turismo Intramuros, opened in 2024 and features 8,000 artifacts, mostly ecclesiastical collections from the adjacent Museo de Intramuros.\n\nThe city's role in national memory is closely tied to José Rizal, the writer and reformist executed in Manila in 1896. His execution site at Bagumbayan became the open space now known as Rizal Park, and it is the city's principal civic ground, where national commemorations and the Traslación's starting point are held. Rizal's novels and his association with the city also made Manila a centre for literature and for debates over national identity, and the city's monuments, schools and streets carry his name in large numbers. These sites give the city a symbolic weight that extends well beyond its administrative boundaries."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Education and research",
      "text": "Manila has some of the oldest and most prominent schools in the Philippines, and its universities and hospitals are closely linked. The best-known institution is the University of Santo Tomas. The institution was established through the initiative of Miguel de Benavides, the third Archbishop of Manila. It was originally conceived as a school to prepare young men for the priesthood. It was founded in 1611 and became a university later. It was established in 1611 as the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Santisimo Rosario and gained university status in 1645. Its claim to be Asia's oldest university is generally accepted, but it is not uncontested. The title of the oldest in the Philippines has been a topic of debate between the University of Santo Tomas and the University of San Carlos. The university is a Dominican institution of learning, and Pope Leo XIII granted it the title of a Pontifical University in 1902. Its teaching was interrupted only twice, from 1898 to 1899, due to the Philippine revolution against Spain; and the second time was from 1942 to 1945, when the Japanese Occupation Forces converted the UST Main building into an internment camp.\n\nThe city's other long-established institutions include colleges founded during the Spanish period. Among those still operating are Colegio de San Juan de Letran (1620), Santa Isabel College Manila (1632), and several others. The city's universities are therefore not a recent development, and their historical ties to the Catholic Church and to Spanish-era institutions remain visible in their identities.\n\nPublic higher education is anchored in the University of the Philippines Manila. UP Manila is a constituent unit of the UP System primarily mandated as a Health Sciences Centre, which emphasizes the highest standards of training and research in the various health sciences. A Health Sciences Center within the University of the Philippines was created through the passage of RA 5163 on June 17, 1967. The campus occupies a 14-hectare campus that occupies two large city blocks in Ermita, and it includes pre-war heritage buildings and structures built during the American Period. The campus also hosts the National Institutes of Health (NIH).\n\nThe university's teaching hospital, the Philippine General Hospital, anchors its clinical work. It is designated as the National University Hospital, and the national government referral center. It has 1,100 beds and 400 private beds, and an estimated 4,000 employees to serve more than 600,000 patients every year. Students of medicine, nursing, physical therapy, pharmacy, occupational therapy, dentistry, and speech pathology train there. Its 16 clinical departments offer residency and fellowship training. Other institutions follow a similar model. The College of Public Health, which traces its origins to the School of Sanitation and Public Health founded in 1927, is a regional reference center in its field. The city's own university, the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, uses the Ospital ng Maynila as its laboratory hospital for students of medicine, nursing and physical therapy.\n\nAccess to these institutions and the challenges they face are shaped by the metropolitan setting. Public universities and the city-run university offer lower-cost places than private institutions, so competition for admission is intense, and students from outside the city often commute from neighboring municipalities or move into crowded rented housing near campuses. Teaching hospitals work under heavy patient loads, which affects the time available for supervised training and research. Their capacity also depends on national and city budgets, which constrain how far facilities and programs can expand. Because the city's universities draw students and clinical cases from the wider region, planning for education and health training requires coordination across the metropolitan area rather than within the city's boundaries alone."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Public health and environmental challenges",
      "text": "Health services and their limits\n\nThe city government runs its own hospitals alongside national facilities. The Gat Andres Bonifacio medical center in Tondo is a district hospital with 150 to 200 beds, and it provides high quality specialized health services with compassion. The Ospital ng Tondo, a 50-bed secondary hospital, was inaugurated in 1994 and was presented by the city as a way to bring care to poorer residents of Tondo, which is a densely populated district. The city's hospital history is also tied to fiscal obligations: a 1957 law required Manila to contribute 1% of its annual income toward national hospitals in the city, the law required Manila to contribute 1% of its annual income for the operation and maintenance of national hospitals in the city.\n\nStaffing is a constraint across the metropolitan region. A UP CIDS policy brief on health access in Metro Manila reports that the number of health professionals, especially in public hospitals, is insufficient, and it estimates a shortfall of 594 doctors based on the accepted standard of 1.1 doctors per 1,000 population. The 2019 Universal Health Care Law was intended to reduce out-of-pocket costs for the poor and to address the fragmentation of the public system, but the brief notes that its success depends on implementation. Measures such as the public health Malasakit Centers, which place assistance desks inside government hospitals, add a further layer. Evidence from primary care sites elsewhere in the Philippines suggests that lower benefit utilization in populations with lower income is a recurring pattern.\n\nCrowding, tuberculosis and dengue\n\nHealth risks are concentrated in the densest neighbourhoods. Tondo alone has more than 650,000 people living clustered in an area of about nine square kilometres, and it is the largest of the city's 16 districts by population and land area. Within such housing, residents often share small, poorly ventilated rooms. Médecins Sans Frontières has linked this overcrowding to a higher risk of tuberculosis transmission, and its Tondo screening work shows the scale of the problem. During the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions on movement and the closure of health facilities led to a sharp drop in the number of diagnosed TB cases, as well as disruptions to TB treatment.\n\nDengue presents a different but related pattern. It is described as the most important mosquito-borne disease in the Philippines, especially in Metropolitan Manila where communities are socially and economically diverse, and a study of Metro Manila communities notes that city governments struggle to provide continuously available piped water. Households that store water in containers are therefore a vector risk, and the study's intervention focused on that storage behaviour. Reported dengue cases at national sentinel sites rose from roughly 37,000 in 2006 to about 119,000 in 2010, and cases dramatically rise following the onset of rains.\n\nWaste, river and bay\n\nSolid waste is one of the most visible environmental problems. Metro Manila has been reported to produce as much as 7,000 metric tons of garbage per day. The Pasig River has become the most visible symbol of this problem, and it is nicknamed the \"toilet bowl\" of Metro Manila because of the large amount of wastes dumped into the river. Estimates of the sources differ across studies. One assessment attributes about 60% of the total pollution in the Pasig River to domestic waste and about 33% to industry, while another attributes roughly 65% to household waste. Industrial discharge is concentrated in factories close to the river, some of which do not have water treatment facilities capable of removing heavy metal pollutants.\n\nWastewater treatment is the central gap. Most households are connected to septic tanks, and most wastewater is discharged untreated due to the rarity of sewage treatment plants. Monitoring has found the river failing standards for dissolved oxygen and biochemical oxygen demand, failing to meet the DENR standard levels of 5 and 7 mg/L. Cleanup campaigns by the private sector and by the government have removed large volumes of silt and garbage, with one company reporting that it removed 8.5 million metric tons of waste from 10 waterways around Metro Manila, but the sources report that the river's quality has not been sustained. Air pollution from traffic and industry adds to the burden in dense districts.\n\nDensity, economy and informality\n\nThese problems are linked to the city's structure. High density in informal settlements means that many households lack adequate sanitation, and in a country where many homes lack indoor plumbing, the river becomes a dumping ground for wastewater. Much of the population lives in informal housing near the port and waterways, where municipal services are limited by the poverty of residents and by the city's budget. Economic activity concentrated in commerce, port operations and manufacturing along the river adds industrial load, while the urbanization of the metropolitan region has pushed more residents into areas with weak infrastructure. The result is that health and environmental outcomes depend on the same underlying conditions that shape the city's housing and services."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Planning, resilience and open questions",
      "text": "Housing is among the most persistent planning problems. One study of Metro Manila estimated that about 21 percent of families, roughly 544,609 households, lived in informal settlements, and that about 13 percent of those families were in areas considered unsafe or hazardous. Relocation has been the main government response, but its design has been contested. Official accounts describe the housing and resettlement policy as mainly off-site, with homes built outside Metro Manila or in rural areas where jobs and social services were limited, and many relocated families moved back to urban centers for work and medical care.\n\nThe Manila Bay rehabilitation program shows how relocation is tied to environmental goals. The government began relocating more than 200,000 families living along waterways, and a large part of the program's initial funding of about PHP 42 billion over roughly seven years was earmarked for resettlement. The head of the Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission has described settlers as a main source of waterway pollution, citing the lack of waste collection and toilets. Residents have raised concerns about the lack of employment at resettlement sites. Legal and legislative changes have pushed in the other direction. A Supreme Court mandate required that families moved away from waterways be resettled within the city, and in 2022 the House of Representatives passed a bill that would make on-site, in-city or near-city relocation the default, with off-site resettlement used only when the nearer options are not feasible. The status of that bill beyond the House vote is not covered here.\n\nGovernance is a second structural constraint. Metro Manila is served by 17 separate local government units, each with substantial autonomy. The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, established in 1995, was given planning, coordination and implementation functions for metro-wide services such as transport, health and disaster risk reduction. Its governing board is the Metro Manila Council, made up of the mayors of the cities and municipalities. Critics argue that the agency lacks sufficient regulatory authority, independent funding and the power to compel policy alignment across city boundaries, and that any metro-wide project can be rejected if individual mayors do not approve it. These arrangements have been linked to delayed responses to flooding, because coordination between national public works agencies, the MMDA and local units has been weak. Debates over whether to replace this model with a centralized metropolitan government, or to strengthen cooperation among local governments, remain unresolved.\n\nSeveral basic questions remain open. The rate of land subsidence differs by district and is not fully mapped, which limits estimates of how far the coastal lowlands will fall relative to the rising sea. Quantifying the city's climate exposure requires combining hazard data, exposure data and the capacity of drainage and housing, and these inputs are unevenly available across the metropolitan area. Population figures also depend on definition. A 2010 count of the metropolitan area reported 11.8 million residents across 16 cities and one municipality, while a later commentary describes a megacity of over 13 million. Because these numbers are based on different boundaries and dates, they cannot be treated as directly comparable, and planning for infrastructure, public health and housing depends heavily on which figure is used."
    }
  ],
  "links": [
    "philippines",
    "ocean",
    "river",
    "metropolitan-area",
    "economic-growth",
    "city",
    "cultural-heritage",
    "islam",
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    "public-health",
    "tuberculosis",
    "pandemic",
    "dengue-fever",
    "poverty",
    "urbanization",
    "infrastructure",
    "sea-level-rise",
    "climate-change"
  ],
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Manila - New World Encyclopedia",
      "url": "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "Etymology of Manila: From Maynilad to Nilad",
      "url": "https://www.scribd.com/document/487860851/CHAPTER-XIII"
    },
    {
      "title": "History of Manila",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "Prehistory of Manila",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "Origin of the Name Manila Explained",
      "url": "https://www.scribd.com/presentation/591398624/Origin-of-the-Word-Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manila, Philippines",
      "url": "https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/geography-and-cartography/manila-philippines/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Pasig River",
      "url": "https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasig_River"
    },
    {
      "title": "Pasig River",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasig_River"
    },
    {
      "title": "Geography of Manila",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manila topographic map, elevation, terrain",
      "url": "https://en-us.topographic-map.com/map-994657/Manila/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Pasig River topographic map, elevation, terrain",
      "url": "https://en-ph.topographic-map.com/map-22lrrr/Pasig-River/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Metro Manila",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "NCR Profile",
      "url": "https://nnc.gov.ph/luzon-region/ncr-profile/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Metro Manila: A Comprehensive Overview",
      "url": "https://www.lionunion.com/metro-manila-a-comprehensive-overview/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Metro Manila: National Capital Region Profile, History and Governance",
      "url": "https://philippines123.com/wiki/Metro_Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "Luzon: NCR: National Capitol Region: - Philippine Tourism and Statistics",
      "url": "https://turistasapilipinas.com/ncr-national-capitol-region/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Outline of Metro Manila",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_Metro_Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manila Weather: Your Ultimate Guide To The Philippines Climate - Tecámac",
      "url": "https://mg.tecamac.gob.mx/manila-weather-your-ultimate-guide-to-the-philippines-climate"
    },
    {
      "title": "Scientists warn vs ‘indirect’ effect of tropical cyclones during the monsoon season",
      "url": "https://www.ateneo.edu/news/2025/07/14/scientists-warn-vs-indirect-effect-tropical-cyclones-during-monsoon-season"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manila Weather & Climate Guide: Seasons, Rain & Heat - Plantrip",
      "url": "https://plantrip.io/weather-expert/442"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manila Weather by Month",
      "url": "https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Rainfall-Temperature-Sunshine,Manila,Philippines"
    },
    {
      "title": "Floodprone areas in Metro-Manila",
      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Floodprone-areas-in-Metro-Manila_fig1_274342848"
    },
    {
      "title": "Why Metro Manila roads flood every time it rains hard",
      "url": "https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2025/07/22/2459884/why-metro-manila-roads-turn-rivers-when-it-pours"
    },
    {
      "title": "Metro Manila: a megacity at the wrong place, wrong time?",
      "url": "https://tessdrive.com/metro-manila-a-megacity-at-the-wrong-place-wrong-time/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manila Flood Guide: Causes, Impact, and Safety Tips",
      "url": "https://www.ecoflow.com/ph/blog/manila-flood-guide"
    },
    {
      "title": "Flooding in Metro Manila and Nearby Provinces: A Recurring Crisis and Paths Toward Resilience",
      "url": "https://medium.com/@ki90grq8y/flooding-in-metro-manila-and-nearby-provinces-a-recurring-crisis-and-paths-toward-resilience-eb026bca6baf"
    },
    {
      "title": "Sentinel-1 Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) reveals continued ground deformation in and around Metro Manila, Philippines, associated with groundwater exploitation",
      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362532040_Sentinel-1_Interferometric_Synthetic_Aperture_Radar_InSAR_reveals_continued_ground_deformation_in_and_around_Metro_Manila_Philippines_associated_with_groundwater_exploitation"
    },
    {
      "title": "Asia’s coastal cities ‘sinking faster than sea level-rise’",
      "url": "https://www.preventionweb.net/news/asias-coastal-cities-sinking-faster-sea-level-rise"
    },
    {
      "title": "(PDF) Global sea-level rise is recognised, but flooding from anthropogenic land subsidence is ignored around northern Manila Bay, Philippines",
      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7264797_Global_sea-level_rise_is_recognised_but_flooding_from_anthropogenic_land_subsidence_is_ignored_around_northern_Manila_Bay_Philippines"
    },
    {
      "title": "1 NEWS ROUNDUP 29 AUGUST 2024 [ 08:00 am] ●",
      "url": "https://climate.gov.ph/public/ckfinder/userfiles/files/News%20Roundup/08_29_2024.pdf"
    },
    {
      "title": "Sinking Cities: Hydrogeological Drivers, Urban Vulnerability, and Sustainable Management Pathways",
      "url": "https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/18/6/2993"
    },
    {
      "title": "Disaster in Slow Motion: Widespread Land Subsidence in and Around Metro Manila, Philippines Quantified By Insar Time-Series Analysis",
      "url": "https://www.jscimedcentral.com/journal-article-info/JSM-Environmental-Science-and-Ecology/Disaster-in-Slow-Motion:-Widespread-Land-Subsidence-in-and-Around-Metro-Manila,-Philippines-Quantified-By-Insar-Time-Series-Analysis-5350"
    },
    {
      "title": "Laguna Copperplate Inscription",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laguna_Copperplate_Inscription"
    },
    {
      "title": "Project MUSE - The Laguna Copperplate Inscription: Tenth-Century Luzon, Java, and the Malay World",
      "url": "https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/146/article/864856"
    },
    {
      "title": "Timeline of Manila",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "Tondo (historical polity) facts for kids",
      "url": "https://kids.kiddle.co/Tondo_(historical_polity)"
    },
    {
      "title": "Maynila (historical polity) facts for kids",
      "url": "https://kids.kiddle.co/Maynila_(historical_polity)"
    },
    {
      "title": "Maynila (historical polity)",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maynila_(historical_polity)"
    },
    {
      "title": "Tondo (historical polity)",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tondo_(historical_polity)"
    },
    {
      "title": "graphsearch.epfl.ch",
      "url": "https://graphsearch.epfl.ch/en/concept/21859275/concepts"
    },
    {
      "title": "History of the Philippines",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Philippines"
    },
    {
      "title": "Castilian War",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castilian_War"
    },
    {
      "title": "THE WILL TO TRADE STEVEN JAMES FLUCKIGER The Will to Trade:",
      "url": "https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7e155a98-0c5f-4309-be57-d74bdb357b27/content"
    },
    {
      "title": "PRE-COLONIAL FILIPINO STATES",
      "url": "https://factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/Philippines/sub5_6a/entry-9921.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Miguel L%C3%B3pez de Legazpi",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_L%C3%B3pez_de_Legazpi"
    },
    {
      "title": "Intramuros",
      "url": "https://intramuros.gov.ph/2015/01/04/intramuros/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Chapter 5 legazpi expedition",
      "url": "https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chapter-5-legazpi-expedition/63632061"
    },
    {
      "title": "Intramuros",
      "url": "https://www.britannica.com/place/Intramuros"
    },
    {
      "title": "Nostalgia Filipinas: Ciudad Murada: Intramuros de Manila",
      "url": "https://nostalgiafilipinas.blogspot.com/2012/04/ciudad-murada-intramuros-de-manila.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "If Walls Could Talk: A Short History of Intramuros",
      "url": "https://simplyphilippines.net/history-of-intramuros/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Intramuros",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intramuros"
    },
    {
      "title": "Intramuros Through Time: From Spanish Colonial Capital to Resilient Heritage District - Best in Manila",
      "url": "https://bestinmanila.com/culture/intramuros-through-time"
    },
    {
      "title": "Explore Intramuros: Uncovering Manila's Historical Gem",
      "url": "https://sinaunangpanahon.com/explore-intramuros-uncovering-manilas-historical-gem/"
    },
    {
      "title": "PHILIPPINES UNDER SPANISH RULE: LIFE, COLONIZATION, CHINESE",
      "url": "https://factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/Philippines/sub5_6a/entry-3836.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Real Alcaicer%C3%ADa de San Fernando",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Alcaicer%C3%ADa_de_San_Fernando"
    },
    {
      "title": "Binondo",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binondo"
    },
    {
      "title": "San Agustin Church (Manila)",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Agustin_Church_(Manila)"
    },
    {
      "title": "THE MANILA CHINESE: COMMUNITY, TRADE AND EMPIRE, C. 1570",
      "url": "https://repository.digital.georgetown.edu/downloads/214a7fd5-64f4-40a0-826d-e1e63221c4db"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manila galleon",
      "url": "https://www.britannica.com/technology/Manila-galleon"
    },
    {
      "title": "Galleon Trade linking China with Latin America- CHINESE SOCIAL SCIENCES NET",
      "url": "http://english.cssn.cn/skw_culture/culture_st/202406/t20240604_5757001.shtml"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Manila Galleon Trade (1565–1815) - The Metropolitan Museum of Art",
      "url": "https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-manila-galleon-trade-1565-1815"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manila Galleon - World History Encyclopedia",
      "url": "https://www.worldhistory.org/Manila_Galleon/"
    },
    {
      "title": "MANILA GALLEONS: SPANISH TRADE BETWEEN THE PHILIPPINES AND MEXICO",
      "url": "https://factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/philippines/sub5_6a/entry-3835.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Manila Galleon - The map as History",
      "url": "https://www.the-map-as-history.com/Portuguese-and-Spanish-empires-16th-18th-centuries/the-manila-galleon"
    },
    {
      "title": "San Diego (ship)",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_(ship)"
    },
    {
      "title": "Sunken Treasures: Ming Dynasty Shipwrecks Found in Philippine Waters - Explore Ming Dynasty",
      "url": "https://mingdynastyhistory.com/ming-dynasty-shipwrecks-philippines/"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Archaeology of Manila Galleons Roberto Junco Abstract",
      "url": "http://themua.org/collections/files/original/61b274c68e00272c5e50f0af53f5b140.pdf"
    },
    {
      "title": "(PDF) Chapter 7 Archaeological Researches on the Manila Galleon Wrecks in the Philippines",
      "url": "https://www.academia.edu/41258279/Chapter_7_Archaeological_Researches_on_the_Manila_Galleon_Wrecks_in_the_Philippines"
    },
    {
      "title": "Battle of Manila (1762)",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manila_(1762)"
    },
    {
      "title": "British occupation of Manila",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_occupation_of_Manila"
    },
    {
      "title": "Sim%C3%B3n de Anda y Salazar",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_de_Anda_y_Salazar"
    },
    {
      "title": "The British occupation of manila",
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    },
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      "title": "Juan de Salcedo",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Salcedo"
    },
    {
      "title": "Limahong",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limahong"
    },
    {
      "title": "Mart%C3%ADn de Goiti",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart%C3%ADn_de_Goiti"
    },
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      "title": "Philippine revolts against Spain",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_revolts_against_Spain"
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      "title": "Battles of La Naval de Manila",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_La_Naval_de_Manila"
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    {
      "title": "Battle of Puerto de Cavite",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Puerto_de_Cavite"
    },
    {
      "title": "Juan de Silva",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Silva"
    },
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      "title": "Antonio de Morga",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_de_Morga"
    },
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      "title": "Early Dutch Relations with Manila, 1600-1750 - Archīum Ateneo",
      "url": "https://archium.ateneo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1702&context=phstudies"
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      "title": "Economic Changes in 19th Century Philippines",
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      "title": "Module 11: Rizal's Context - Economic, Social & Political Changes in the 19th Century - Studocu",
      "url": "https://www.studocu.com/ph/document/capiz-state-university/the-life-and-works-of-rizal/module-2-the-life-and-works-of-rizal/36478290"
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      "title": "19th Century Philippines and Rizal's Context",
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      "title": "The 19th Century Philippines - Presentor.pptx",
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      "title": "Some Not Very Well Known Facts About Rizal’s Trial and Execution — Positively Filipino",
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      "title": "Ilustrado — Grokipedia",
      "url": "https://grokipedia.com/page/Ilustrado"
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      "title": "Philippine Revolution",
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      "title": "Rizal's Trial and Execution: Four Days, a Predetermined Verdict, and a Catastrophic Miscalculation",
      "url": "https://www.joserizal.com/legacy/rizal-trial-and-execution/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Dec. 30, 1896: Dr. Jose Rizal executed in Bagumbayan",
      "url": "https://usa.inquirer.net/186502/dec-30-1896-dr-jose-rizal-executed-in-bagumbayan"
    },
    {
      "title": "Trial and execution of Jos%C3%A9 Rizal",
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    },
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      "title": "Propaganda Movement",
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      "title": "Historical Background",
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      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366320407_Manila_City_Beautiful_Lost_A_Historical_and_Configurational_Analysis_of_Daniel_Burnham's_Proposed_1905_City_Beautiful_Plan"
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      "title": "The Plan_ Manila _ Daniel H. Burnham_ Plans for the Philippines",
      "url": "https://www.scribd.com/document/457303992/The-Plan-Manila-Daniel-H-Burnham-Plans-for-the-Philippines"
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      "title": "LECdevelopment of Manila - Daniel Burnham in the Philippines In the winter of 1904-1905, Chicago - Studocu",
      "url": "https://www.studocu.com/ph/document/university-of-northern-philippines/bs-architecture/lecdevelopment-of-manila/52913133"
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      "title": "Morley",
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      "title": "Rizal Park",
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    {
      "title": "Taking Daniel Burnham’s 1904–1905 visit to the Philippines as a starting",
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      "url": "https://verafiles.org/articles/commemorating-the-battle-for-the-liberation-of-manila"
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      "title": "Treaty of Manila (1946)",
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      "title": "President Quezon's 1939 dream city turns 85 on Oct. 12",
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      "title": "How QC became biggest LGU in Metro Manila",
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      "title": "Quezon City",
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    {
      "title": "Metro Manila",
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      "title": "Metropolitan Manila Development Authority",
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      "title": "Governor of Metro Manila",
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      "url": "https://ppp.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/The-Local-Government-of-the-Philippines.pdf"
    },
    {
      "title": "CITY COUNCIL",
      "url": "https://manila.gov.ph/city-council/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manila City Council",
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    },
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      "title": "List of barangays of Metro Manila",
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      "url": "https://psa.gov.ph/content/highlights-national-capital-region-ncr-population-2024-census-population-2024-popcen"
    },
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      "title": "Metropolitan Manila",
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      "url": "https://devere-philippines.ph/en/news/Metro-Manila-posts-stronger-5-point-6-percent-economic-growth-in-2024"
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      "title": "Manila",
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      "url": "https://theconversation.com/street-vendors-self-help-strategies-highlight-cities-neglect-of-how-the-other-half-survive-110283"
    },
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      "title": "Port of Manila",
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      "title": "Manila Retains Trillion-Peso Economy Status, Ranks Third in GDP Among Cities",
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    },
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      "title": "Manila, Philippines - Philippines International Port",
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      "title": "Manila",
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      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362807229_Spanish_Colonial_Enclave_Urbanism_Manila's_Intramuros_and_how_exclusion_and_waterway_connectivity_created_the_Binondo_Manila_Chinatown_Trading_District"
    },
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      "url": "https://asianjournal.com/features/binondo-the-worlds-oldest-chinatown-and-manilas-enduring-corridor-of-commerce-and-cuisine/"
    },
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      "url": "https://bestinmanila.com/neighborhoods/binondo-chinatown-manila"
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      "url": "https://mypinas.ph/zip-code/ncr/manila/"
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    },
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      "url": "https://ro.mwss.gov.ph/concessionaires-performance/"
    },
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      "title": "PRRD inks laws granting Maynilad, Manila Water 25-yr franchises",
      "url": "https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1164865"
    },
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      "title": "Manila Water Concession Agreement for Water and Sanitation Services",
      "url": "https://ppp.worldbank.org/node/9569"
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      "title": "MWSS revokes extension of Maynilad, Manila Water concession deals",
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    },
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    {
      "title": "Feast of the Black Nazarene",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_the_Black_Nazarene"
    },
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      "title": "[Black Nazarene of Quiapo] Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno (N.P.J.N)",
      "url": "https://epa.culturalcenter.gov.ph/3/82/2146/"
    },
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      "title": "FEAST OF THE BLACK NAZARENE",
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    },
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    },
    {
      "title": "Philippines: Record number of people attend Black Nazarene celebrations - Vatican News",
      "url": "https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2026-01/philippines-record-number-people-black-nazarene-celebrations.html"
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      "url": "https://asianjournal.com/philippines/metro-manila/inside-the-black-nazarene-procession-the-philippines-largest-annual-religious-gathering/"
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      "url": "https://bestinmanila.com/venues/intramuros-through-time"
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      "title": "Museo de Intramuros",
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    },
    {
      "title": "Filipino faith and artistry at the Museo de Intramuros - BusinessWorld Online",
      "url": "https://bworldonline.com/editors-picks/2019/05/08/229596/filipino-faith-and-artistry-at-the-museo-de-intramuros/"
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      "title": "University of the Philippines Manila",
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      "title": "Philippine General Hospital",
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      "title": "UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMAS",
      "url": "https://businessmirror.com.ph/2026/04/18/university-of-santo-tomas-revisiting-asias-oldest-university/"
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      "url": "https://cids.up.edu.ph/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/UP-CIDS-Policy-Brief-2020-11.pdf"
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    {
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      "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11467555/"
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      "url": "https://reliefweb.int/report/philippines/tackling-tuberculosis-slums-manila"
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      "url": "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3541901/"
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      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_the_Pasig_River"
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      "title": "(PDF) The Water Quality of the Pasig River in the City of Manila, Philippines: Current Status, Management and Future Recovery",
      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221965572_The_Water_Quality_of_the_Pasig_River_in_the_City_of_Manila_Philippines_Current_Status_Management_and_Future_Recovery"
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      "url": "https://shunwaste.com/article/is-pasig-river-still-polluted"
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      "url": "https://www.eeer.org/upload/eer-15-3-173-.pdf"
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    },
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      "url": "https://www.commonwealthfund.org/international-health-policy-center/countries/philippines"
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      "title": "Philippines: Tackling tuberculosis in the slums of Manila",
      "url": "https://www.msf.org/philippines-tackling-tuberculosis-slums-manila"
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      "url": "https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1120103"
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      "url": "https://news.mongabay.com/2019/10/manilas-informal-settlers-face-relocation-in-exchange-for-clean-bay/"
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      "url": "https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1059552"
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      "url": "https://nextcity.org/features/slum-lab-manilas-quest-to-build-a-better-informal-settlement"
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      "url": "https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1188567"
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      "title": "Metro Manila needs Institutional Reform—Not Just Infrastructure - Management Association of the Philippines",
      "url": "https://map.org.ph/metro-manila-needs-institutional-reform-not-just-infrastructure/"
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      "url": "https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/copy-of-mm-profile-and-inst-arrgmnts/23489675"
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      "url": "https://www.morefunwithjuan.com/2023/05/mmda-meaning-and-functions.html"
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      "title": "Strong institutions are critical to the effective management of",
      "url": "https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/931371495809283076/pdf/115312-PN-P156898-PUBLIC-Policy-Notes-Urban-Institutions-FINAL2.pdf"
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      "url": "https://pidswebs.pids.gov.ph/CDN/PUBLICATIONS/ris-old-backups/pdf/pidsdps9903.PDF"
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  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}