Bohol
The province of Bohol is a first-class province divided into 3 congressional districts, comprising 1 component city and 47 municipalities. It has 1,109 barangays.
The province is a popular tourist destination with its beaches and resorts. The Chocolate Hills, numerous mounds of brown-colored limestone formations, are the most popular attraction. The formations can be seen by land (climbing the highest point) or by air via ultralight air tours. Panglao Island, located just southwest of Tagbilaran, is famous for its diving locations and is routinely listed as one of the top ten diving locations in the world. Numerous tourist resorts and dive centers dot the southern beaches. The Philippine tarsier, among the world's smallest primates, is indigenous to the island.
It was the home province of Carlos P. Garcia, the eighth president of the Republic of the Philippines (1957–1961) who was born in Talibon, Bohol.
On October 15, 2013, Bohol was devastated by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake whose epicenter was 6 km south of Sagbayan. The earthquake, which also hit southern Cebu, claimed 222 lives altogether and injured 374 people. It also destroyed or damaged a number of Bohol's heritage churches.
In 2017, the provincial government began initiating the nomination of the entire province to the UNESCO Global Geoparks Network.
Bohol is ultimately derived from bo-ol, a kind of tree that flourished on the island. Similar to Nahuatl, the h in the middle was used to transcribe a glottal stop which is a common phoneme in the languages of the Philippines. The original name is survived through Bool, a town in Tagbilaran where Miguel Lopez de Legazpi supposedly landed.
Map - Bohol
Map
Country - Philippines
Flag of the Philippines |
Negritos, some of the archipelago's earliest inhabitants, were followed by successive waves of Austronesian peoples. Adoption of animism, Hinduism and Islam established island-kingdoms called Kedatuan, Rajahnates, and Sultanates. The arrival of Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer leading a fleet for Spain, marked the beginning of Spanish colonization. In 1543, Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos named the archipelago Las Islas Filipinas in honor of Philip II of Spain. Spanish settlement through Mexico, beginning in 1565, led to the Philippines becoming ruled by the Spanish Empire for more than 300 years. During this time, Catholicism became the dominant religion, and Manila became the western hub of trans-Pacific trade. In 1896, the Philippine Revolution began, which then became entwined with the 1898 Spanish–American War. Spain ceded the territory to the United States, while Filipino revolutionaries declared the First Philippine Republic. The ensuing Philippine–American War ended with the United States establishing control over the territory, which they maintained until the Japanese invasion of the islands during World War II. Following liberation, the Philippines became independent in 1946. Since then, the unitary sovereign state has often had a tumultuous experience with democracy, which included the overthrow of a decades-long dictatorship by a nonviolent revolution.
Currency / Language
ISO | Currency | Symbol | Significant figures |
---|---|---|---|
PHP | Philippine peso | ₱ | 2 |
ISO | Language |
---|---|
EN | English language |
TL | Tagalog language |