THE SPANISH COLONIAL TRADITION From 1565 to 1898 the Philippines was a colony of Spain. During this long period, Spanish-influenced architecture appeared, namely, the iglesia or simbahan (church) and its adjoining campanario (bell tower) and convento (residence of the parish priest), the escuela (school), the fuerza or fortaleza (fortification), the civic buildings like the casa real and tribunal, the farola (lighthouses), the bahay na bato (dwellings of wood and stone), and the puente (stone bridges). It is generally acknowledged that the Philippines is the bastion of Christianity in the Orient. Some scholars believe that, because of this, the country absorbed the greatest degree of influence from the west in the Asian region, losing much of its identity in the process. Other scholars believe, however, that all these influences were really assimilated by the older ethnic base, which actually indigenized them. It is pointed out, for example, that the Spanish word for church, iglesia, never became fully accepted among the Filipinos, who used their own terms to denote a place of worship. Thus the Tagalog and Cebuano use simbahan, the Ilocano, simbaan, and the Pampango, pisamban. This process of indigenization was to characterize much of Filipino construction during the more than three centuries of Spanish colonization.

The Beginnings The history of Philippine architecture under the Spanish regime begins with the arrival of Miguel Lopez de Legaspi’s expedition in 1565. In Cebu, Legaspi’s men founded a city, built a chapel, and erected a fort. The Spaniards then spent a short while in Iloilo, but because of promising reports they continued further north to Manila. In 1571 they took over the charred remains of the settlement of the city’s previous native ruler Soliman. Legaspi then traced the borders of the new Spanish city on the strategic tongue of land at the mouth