Vigan
The Last Spanish Town
Portrait
Vigan's Calle Crisologo is a street of bahay na bato — stone-and-wood houses with sliding capiz-shell windows — built by Chinese merchants who married into Ilocano families, and the town survived the war because the Japanese commander withdrew rather than fight in it. Horse-drawn calesas still work the streets, and the pottery kilns fire jars as they have for centuries.