Coffee Shops

Santiago City Roads

Santiago City Buildings

Pattaradday Festival Parade

Santiago City Landmarks

Santiago City

EAT, TRADE, PRAY: The Path to Coexistence in Santiago City
by Stephanie Dychiu

With more than 17 ethnolinguistic tribes in a population of less than 150,000, Santiago City can teach the world a thing or two about getting along. In this junction of the Cagayan Valley, commerce, cuisine, and creed are the keys to living in harmony.

In a small municipality eight hours north of Metro Manila, a simple canvas sign with the word “COEXIST” stands like the Statue of Liberty at the entrance of the town hall.

A closer look reveals the symbolism behind the spelling of the word. The “C” is the Islamic crescent moon, the “O” is the pagan pentacle, the “E” is Einstein’s formula E = MC squared, the “X” is the Jewish Star of David, the dot on the “I” is the Buddhist dharma wheel, the “S” is the yin yang symbol of Taoism, and the “T” is the cross of Christianity.

This is the Municipality of Santiago, for whom the presence of at least seventeen ethno-linguistic groups gives the word “coexist” a special significance.


Though part of the Cagayan Valley region—an area rich with some of the most fascinating caves, waterfalls, and islands in the country—Santiago takes singular pride in being an independent component city, one of only four in the Philippines. This means Santiago is not subject to the supervision of a provincial governor, and townsfolk enjoy the thrill of scribbling “Santiago City, Philippines”, no province needed, whenever they write down their addresses.

In recent years, the government of Santiago has organized an annual festival to celebrate the city’s remarkable ethnic diversity. Baptized “Pattaradday”, the Ibanag word for “unity”, the festival takes place every first week of May, when the city commemorates the time in 1743 when the Municipality of Santiago was first created by royal Spanish decree.

Hundreds of the best street dancers in the Philippines, from the Ibon-Ebun performers of Pampanga to the Pintaflores dancers of San Carlos City, Negros Occidental, gather in Santiago during Pattaradday to represent the various ethnic groups that have made the city home.

Santiago’s determination to carve out a unified identity from the many bloodlines that run through its veins is influenced by the role it plays in the entire Cagayan Valley Region.

Between the rambling peaks of the Sierra Madre, Cordillera, and Caraballo mountains flows the longest and largest river in the Philippines—the Cagayan River. Long before Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Salcedo landed in the area in 1572, the waters of the river already sustained many tribal settlements, one of which was the Ibanag, who named themselves after “Banag”, the native word for “river”.

Today, the Cagayan River is the geographic link that binds the provinces of Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya, and Quirino into one political unit, the Cagayan Valley Region. Of the four main cities of the region, Santiago is the closest by land to Metro Manila. It is also the meeting point of the main roads of the four provinces of the Cagayan Valley .

With travel and trade in the region dependent on land transport, Santiago’s location has turned out to be its biggest advantage, enabling it to become the gateway to the farming, caving, hiking, and gamefishing treasures of the Cagayan Valley.

Santiago’s economic future is practically assured, but it needs to protect the many distinct cultures that have thrived in the city, which can be diluted by the intoxicating march of progress. By celebrating the Pattaradday Festival every year, Santiago’s people are able to remember their multicultural roots and keep their traditions alive.

* * *
Commerce has a way of putting people of different backgrounds on common ground. Even at the public market, the unifying magic of Pattaradday can be seen. An inspection of the goods for sale shows bounty from the sea caught in Pangasinan, gleaming white rice grown in Cagayan province, and, of course, Santiago’s very own panutsa, or stiff cakes of hardened sugarcane syrup.

The odd mix of food popular in the city also shows the multifacted origins of Santiago’s people. The Ilonggo import chicken inasal, or roast chicken, is a staple. Indeed, this area far away from the original home of chicken inasal in Western Visayas has developed its own brand of the roast chicken, called “Mang Pandoy’s Chicken Inasal”, with outlets not just in Santiago but also in other parts of Northern Luzon, such as Cauayan and Tuguegarao.

Challenging the domination of chicken inasal, roasted chicken, in the palates of Santiaguenos is goat meat or kambing. Many kambingan, or restaurants specializing in goat meat, have come and gone in Santiago, but none have been able to rival the success of the very first kambingan on #48 City Road. Lest anyone forgets, the sign out front bears a reminder that it is “The Original Place”. This kambingan is said to be the best kambingan between Santiago and Bicol, the acknowledged mecca of chevon connoisseurs. There are only three dishes on the menu, all made from goat meat, of course. Kaldereta is a golden yellow stew of tomato sauce, cheese, garlic, onions, pepper, and peas. Kilawin has strips of meat cooked, not over fire, but in a mixture of vinegar, chili, onions, and ginger. And Papaitan is a bowl of entrails floating in a murky green soup of bile.

* * *
. . . the church with the largest congregation is the parish of St. James. In this church, the broad-minded tenets of Pattaradday are carried on even to matters of faith. Mass is delivered in three different languages—Tagalog, Ilokano, and English. As the language used by the priest to deliver the homily changes, so the language used by the choir to sing also shifts.

The St. James Parish also distributes the Holy Bible written in Ibanag. True to their native word Pattaradday, which means “unity”, the Ibanag are said to be the most adaptable and most open to assimilation among all indigenous Filipino tribes. They were instrumental to the spread of Christianity in the Cagayan Valley region, because it was their language that the early Spanish missionaries were able to learn and propagate even to other tribes.

The innate adaptability of their Ibanag ancestors may explain why the mostly Catholic Santiaguenos are able to maintain an uncommon openness toward people of other cultures and religious beliefs. For a small city that is not even on the route map of local airlines, the number of well-established non-Christian religious communities in Santiago is significant.

The Omar Ben Abdul Azez Mosque has a good-sized congregation. During Martial Law in the Seventies, many Muslims came to Santiago to escape persecution in Mindanao.