Cebu City Audioguides

Cebu City was founded on February 13, 1565, when Miguel Lopez de Legazpi and Augustinian friars established the first permanent Spanish settlement in the Philippines, making it the oldest colonial city in the archipelago. But the European claim began 44 years earlier: Ferdinand Magellan planted a cross here in April 1521 during the first circumnavigation of the globe. That cross, Magellan's Cross, is still displayed in a chapel on Magallanes Street near the Basilica Minore del Santo Nino, which houses the oldest religious relic in the Philippines, a small image of the Christ Child given to Rajah Humabon's wife at Magellan's baptism. The rajahnate that preceded the Spanish, with Rajah Tupas who ultimately drove Legazpi's forces to a standoff, placed Cebu at the center of Philippine pre-colonial history as well as its colonial one.

Colon Street, running through downtown, is the oldest national road in the Philippines, now a dense commercial corridor where the colonial-era grid meets contemporary urban retail.

Fort San Pedro, the Spanish triangular bastion on the harbor, survives largely intact as the smallest of the Spanish forts in the country. The Sinulog Festival, held on the third Sunday of January, is the largest street festival in the Philippines: a dance-prayer ritual of pre-Hispanic origin involving two steps forward and one step back in honor of the Santo Nino, performed by thousands through the city streets over days of increasing intensity. It draws over a million people and is the most spectacular celebration in the archipelago.