Overnight in the past
A couple of years ago, I recommended a weekend overnighter on Corregidor Island for Manileños seeking fresher alternatives to Tagaytay, Subic, and Baguio. Earlier this month, I found myself asking the same question on the approach of my wife’s birthday: “Where can I take Beng that we haven’t been before, not more than a few hours’ drive out of the city, which will provide a unique and hopefully affordable experience?”
After several days of searching online, I finally found what I was looking for: the Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar Heritage Resort in Bagac, Bataan, a collection — and that word is meant to be taken literally — of more than two dozen colonial houses from all over the country that owner Jerry Acuzar acquired and painstakingly restored or rebuilt so they could be lived in again and enjoyed by a new generation of Filipinos.
I’d heard about the place and about Acuzar’s project before — any endeavor on that grand a scale is bound to draw attention, if not raise the eyebrows and hackles of a few — but I’d never had a chance to visit the resort until Beng’s birthday treat came up.
The reservations were easy enough to make at www.lascasasfilipinas.com, the resort’s website which also gives ample previews of all the architectural delights and amenities to be found in Las Casas Filipinas. It’s also where you discover that while some of the larger houses can be rented by families and traveling groups for five-figure sums, a Studio de Luxe room for two, with breakfast and tour included, costs only P3,825 on weekdays — even less than what you’d pay for a comparable room in the heart of Manila.
To be more accurate, you make an inquiry on the form rather than a reservation, and I was worried from what I’d read elsewhere that two weeks’ advance notice was usually required; I was asking if we could be there in three days. As it turned out, we did the right thing in choosing a midweek slot, when the demand for rooms is very likely lower, and got a booking confirmation shortly after. I also established that the resort offered overnight accommodations and three full meals for drivers for just P550 more — a service that I wish more places would offer.
I could have driven there myself without too much trouble, had I felt up to it; Bagac proved to be an easy three-hour drive from Manila on largely good roads. A right turn on the main highway in Bataan leads you to and past the Mt. Samat shrine into a scenic series of curves that end on the seafront in Bagac, where the resort —announced by a period gate — suddenly opens up amid ricefields and sprawls like an ethereal vision from two centuries past.
You’re there to relax, and you will — but you also quickly realize that “resort” is something of a misnomer, and “museum” is in many ways more appropriate to the place. That the houses are open to the public and livable is a bonus; Acuzar’s grand achievement has been to muster the vision, the resources, and the will to recover these old but culturally valuable structures from almost certain destruction and oblivion, and to preserve them in a way that younger Filipinos alienated from their own history and heritage can appreciate.
The houses range from the majestic, three-story Casa Bizantina built in Binondo in 1890 by Don Lorenzo del Rosario to the more plebeian Casa Cagayan, a sub-group of four all-wooden houses on stilts facing the seashore. Some houses are more storied (and here, we don’t mean floor levels) than others: Casa Unisan, now used as a restaurant, was the scene of bloody murder; Casa Biñan, based on the Alberto-Alonso house in Laguna, houses dark family secrets involving the mother of Jose Rizal. Our tour guide — a comely and smart young lady from Orani named Harlene — led us on a one-hour walking tour that day trippers can also take with lunch and snacks in a package.
Beng and I had come to stay the night — me to write, she to swim and to unwind — and our lodgings did not disappoint. The resort has a 17-room hotel, Paseo de Escolta, built to replicate a commercial building in Manila in the early 1900s, with shops on the ground floor and residences above. Our second-floor studio was surprisingly spacious and very tastefully designed (by Mrs. Tess Acuzar herself, being an interior designer) in period style, but with all the modern conveniences you’d expect from the 21st century hotel — air-con, a hot shower, big TV, and a fridge (except Wi-Fi, which you can get at the reception area). Quaintly enough, as it had rained on the day we got there, we were greeted on the steps leading up to our room by a frog and a grasshopper.
But one delight I least expected was the food at Café Marivent, which serves both Filipino and continental dishes. Beng and I agreed that this alone was worth the trip. Many exclusive resorts trap you into buying bad food at outrageous prices, but here, lunch or dinner for two, including dessert, could be had for less than P1,000; I like simple food, and the chicken binakol, seafood sinigang, and kinilaw na tanguigue were to die for in their freshness and flavor. The servings were enormous, and when the waiters saw that we couldn’t finish our dinner portions, they kindly offered to refrigerate the leftovers for us to add to next day’s lunch — a service I’d never encountered anywhere else.
Like I mentioned earlier, a project on this massive scale can’t happen without its critics, whose concerns range from the removal of the houses from their original environment and cultural context to the faithfulness and completeness of the restoration. But without diminishing the value of contrary voices, when you tour the houses and imagine what may have happened to them without Acuzar’s intervention, you’ll probably agree that his solution may be the best compromise in a difficult situation where not even the government can do much to save the country’s oldest and grandest houses. As the former owner of one of the houses puts it, “As unfortunate as it is that we couldn’t maintain it ourselves in its original location, it is heartwarming to know that my family’s ancestral home survives… standing proud and tall, and in resplendent beauty.”
That beauty is immeasurably enhanced by the resort’s location on the coast, with foamy waves crashing in cadence on the gray shores. (Barely perceptible on the right edge of the horizon is the silhouette of the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, another architectural relic.) The sea is too rough for swimming — although the local Bataan kids seem to think otherwise, and plunge into the surf with abandon; resort guests can safely laze in an infinity pool that gleams in sunlight against the towering rain clouds over the distant mountaintops.
On the drive back to Manila, we took a short detour to revisit Mt. Samat, from where the whole of the Bataan peninsula lay at our feet like a green carpet, the regrowth obscuring the scars of vicious war from seven decades past. Indeed the past may never be so simple as a pretty house — which after all took a score of servants to maintain — but even just to be made to think about it in an age obsessed with newness should be well worth the journey to Bagac.
