Holidays in Philippines

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Philippines

The Day That Never Happened

For nearly three centuries, the Philippines kept a calendar that made no geographic sense. When Spanish ships crossed the Pacific from Mexico to establish colonial rule in the sixteenth century, they carried their day-count with them rather than adjusting it to match the lands they were sailing toward, so the islands stayed synchronised with Spain's American colonies on the far side of the ocean rather than with their actual Asian neighbours. The practical result was strange: it could be Sunday in Manila while it was already Monday a short sail away in Batavia, present-day Jakarta.

By the mid-1800s, with Spain having lost its American colonies and Philippine trade increasingly oriented toward China and the Dutch East Indies, the mismatch had become a genuine liability. On 16 August 1844, Governor-General Narciso Claveria, after consulting the Archbishop of Manila, issued a decree to fix it outright: Monday, 30 December 1844, would be followed immediately by Wednesday, 1 January 1845. Tuesday, 31 December 1844, simply never occurred in the Philippines, erased from the calendar by administrative order. It would be another forty years before the world formalised the concept of an International Date Line at all, in 1884, which means the Philippines had already solved, on its own initiative, a problem the rest of the world had not yet agreed existed.

The Longest Regularly Scheduled Voyage in the World

For two hundred and fifty years, from 1565 to 1815, one or more heavily laden galleons made the crossing between Manila and Acapulco on a schedule dictated entirely by wind. Ships left Manila at the end of June or the start of July, riding the southwest monsoon north toward Japan to catch the Kuroshio Current and the prevailing westerlies before turning east across the Pacific, a route historians have called the longest continuous line of navigation in recorded history. The eastbound crossing alone typically took five to six months, sometimes stretching past nine, through waters where storms, disease and scurvy killed a substantial share of each crew.

The return leg ran on an entirely different clock. Galleons departed Acapulco in March or April, catching the northeast trade winds for a far faster run, typically eight to ten weeks, back to the Philippines, timed to arrive at the Strait of San Bernardino by June or July before the summer typhoon season made the archipelago's waters lethal to approach. Modern climate scientists have since mined the surviving departure and arrival logs of these voyages, which run in an unbroken annual sequence for a century and a half, to reconstruct centuries of Pacific wind patterns, turning a colonial trade route once measured in profit and peril into one of the longest continuous climate records ever assembled from human activity alone.

Seven-Oh-Three in the Morning

At precisely 7:03 on the morning of 30 December 1896, José Rizal, the writer and reformist whose novels had helped shape Filipino national consciousness, was executed by firing squad at Bagumbayan Field in Manila on charges of rebellion, sedition and conspiracy, a case historians generally regard as a show trial. He had spent his final hours writing farewell letters and completing a poem, later known as Mi Último Adiós, which he hid inside an alcohol stove and passed to his sister only hours before his death.

The specific date carries an almost eerie numerical echo in Philippine history: Rizal died on 30 December, the same calendar date that, exactly fifty-two years earlier, had been the last real day the Philippines experienced before Governor-General Claveria's decree erased the following day from existence entirely. The coincidence carries no deeper connection between the two events beyond the shared date, but 30 December has since been observed annually as Rizal Day, a national holiday commemorating the execution that many historians consider the spark which hardened Filipino resistance into the revolution that would, within two years, end Spanish colonial rule altogether.

Four Days on One Avenue

By February 1986, twenty years of Ferdinand Marcos's increasingly authoritarian rule had been pushed toward collapse by a snap presidential election three weeks earlier, widely viewed as stolen through fraud, and by the still-raw memory of the 1983 assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. On 22 February, Defence Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and armed forces Vice Chief of Staff Fidel Ramos publicly withdrew their support for Marcos and barricaded themselves inside Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the ring road that gave the uprising its name.

Cardinal Jaime Sin, Archbishop of Manila, used Church radio to call ordinary citizens into the streets to protect the defecting soldiers, and hundreds of thousands answered over the following three days, forming human barricades between government tanks and the rebel camps without a single shot exchanged between the two sides. By 25 February, both Marcos and Aquino had separately been sworn in as president at competing ceremonies, but Marcos's position had already collapsed; that evening, he and his family were flown out of the country to exile in Hawaii, and Corazon Aquino's presidency began, bringing a twenty-year dictatorship to an end in a single, largely bloodless four-day span still studied worldwide as a model of nonviolent political change.

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