Audioguides Quezon City

Quezon City was conceived in 1939 as a deliberate alternative to overcrowded Manila -- a planned capital where, as President Manuel Quezon put it, common Filipinos could actually live and thrive. Commonwealth Act 502 created it from eight vast estates, with wide streets, a university campus at Diliman, and genuine ambition. It became the national capital in 1948 and then lost that designation back to Manila in 1976, leaving a city of over three million that had reorganized itself around a function it no longer held.

What it kept was scale, diversity, and cultural weight.

The UP Diliman campus sprawls across 493 hectares in the center of the city, its Academic Oval lined with acacia trees and used by thousands of joggers and cyclists from before dawn. Cubao holds the massive Araneta Coliseum -- completed in 1960 and for decades the largest domed arena in Asia -- where Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier in what was billed as the Thrilla in Manila (though it was actually held here). EDSA, the long arterial highway, functioned as the spine of the 1986 People Power Revolution that ended the Marcos dictatorship.