Siquijor: Back to Witches’ Island

Siquijor was known as a place of sorcery decades ago. Has its magic endured?

On my first evening in Siquijor, I went to a deserted beach to make a phone call. 

This happened a long time ago, yet I clearly remember that moonless night. The sea lay before me shrouded in black, while behind me a lone flickering streetlamp tried to illuminate the town of Lazi, where my lodging was located. 

Close to midnight there were few other souls around. The wind blew a shrill whisper that moved branches and snuffed out candles on the windows of nearby homes. A sense of foreboding seemed to linger in the air. This would have been a good setting for a spooky story—something that involved a white lady or an aswang or some other dreaded creature of Philippine folklore.

In the darkness, I tried in vain to use whatever faint cell signal there was. Waves lapped gently at my feet, and I took in the eerie silence of this otherwise pleasant evening. From the roadside came my habal-habal driver, a balding fellow with a perpetual smile.

“We have to leave soon,” he announced in an uneasy tone. “A strange old man is said to roam these streets at night. They say he carries a coffin on his back and that he disappears in front of the cemetery. I don’t want to bump into this man!”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that claim, but for caution’s sake I stopped going out late. This happened way back in 1998, on a magazine assignment to cover this island on the southern end of the Visayas Region. 

Siquijor was a reputed home of the supernatural—a place where evil mangkukulam and engkantos were said to lurk in the shadows with their pins and their rag dolls and their bubbling cauldrons of toil and trouble. Nonetheless, with my camera and notebook, I explored its hidden corners and uncovered a place that was as beautiful as it was misunderstood.

It turned out that Siquijor’s mystical reputation was just one aspect of an island blessed with gorgeous shores and friendly folk—and that these different sides all added up to a bewitchingly beautiful sum.

Siquijor Revisited

Fast forward twenty-seven years, and I am back here looking at a place that has changed quite a bit. It is another moonless evening in Lazi, but the town is anything but dark. Along a seaside promenade that used to be the beach, a line of brightly lit restaurants is serving up dinner for a decent crowd of tourists. There’s now 4G coverage, by the way—and it reaches everywhere. My local friend Butch Miraflor—a born-and-bred Siquijodnon musician—shows me around this town that now feels almost but not quite familiar.

“Much has happened after your last visit,” he reports as we walk through Main Street, formerly a sleepy one-bakery strip that now hosts bistros and even a burger bar. Motorbikes putter down the road, past groups of residents and visitors enjoying the evening air. No doubt the island has grown in popularity. This isn’t surprising at all, as my companion notes. 

“We’ve been seeing outsiders here from as far back as the nineties, but there weren’t many of them because accommodations were scarce,” Butch notes. Things picked up in the early 2000s when investors started building hotels and resorts. “The island is a lot busier these days because of tourists. Remember Manay Bertie’s house where you stayed in 1998? It’s now an Airbnb!”

Island Traverse

Over the next few days, we go around the island on its lone coastal road to discover what else has changed. From Lazi, it’s a thirty-minute ride through hilly, forest-fringed terrain towards the picture-perfect shoreline of San Juan—currently Siquijor’s biggest attraction.

Back in ’98 it had just a handful of resorts; today we see a parade of establishments ranging from humble guesthouses to the rather posh, eight-thousand-pesos-per-night THE SEANDYOU Beach Resort. 

Not surprisingly, this tourist strip also packs plenty of dining options. Where I used to feast at carinderias serving homemade pork humba and kinilaw are now restaurants offering baby back ribs and authentic Naples-style margheritas. And where I once photographed a spear fisherman with his freshly-caught pugita (octopus), there is now Paliton Beach—a supremely Instagrammable hotspot where customers line up to have their videos taken by a “human drone.”

You really have to Google this one: a customer sits on a huge swing while a local kid runs around taking said customer’s footage with angles mimicking that of a real drone. The resulting videos are worthy of their own YouTube channel—and instead of warning viewers about a sinister witches’ hideout, they all portray Siquijor as a tropical island paradise.

Elsewhere in the province, other significant spots await. At Enrique Villanueva on the northeast coast, we check out a cluster of mangrove trees that gifted me with one of my most memorable sunrise photos ever. Thankfully they’re still there, and—judging from the group of shutterbugs onsite—they are now a bona fide scenic spot. 

Further south at Salagdoong Beach, we see local ekskarsyonistas enjoying the pearly sands and turquoise waters alongside sun-worshippers from all over the world. Buzzing as these attractions are, I am delighted to see that they’ve aged rather well. The crowds are nowhere as big as those of, say, Bali or Phuket—and despite their presence, this island happily retains its rustic feel.

Mystery Men

Indeed, Siquijor has grown from an obscure island into one of the Philippines’ fastest-growing holiday destinations. For its supposed witches, such visibility offers the chance to be a recognized part of this locale’s unique heritage. At the Olang Arts Park we speak with Ricardo Oyog, a traditional healer, or mananambal, who comes here on an on-call basis.

“Outsiders used to think I practiced witchery. But the mananambal’s craft belongs to a discipline that dates back to pre-Hispanic times.” This he says as he shows us his “tools”: bronze talismans, a wooden cross, a smooth pebble, and a piece of fabric adorned with Latin inscriptions. 

Centuries of Spanish colonization gave it a pseudo-Christian flavor, but this body of knowledge largely remains in its original form. “In the old days, patients had to go all the way to the island’s mountainous interior to seek out a mananambal; now all it takes is a text message,” he quips. 

Ricardo’s craft is best experienced through the tuob—a kind of smoke bath that mixes prayers with the burning of curative herbs. When done right, it is said to fix everything from a simple flu to a spiritual attack by their sinister counterparts, the shady mambabarang.

“Now those guys are rare these days,” Butch chimes in. “When I was growing up, I heard stories of local folks throwing dynamite at the houses of suspected mambabarang!”

There’s also this other individual whom I have been wanting to revisit. I previously photographed Mr. Enrique Bonachita doing the bolo-bolo—a form of psychic medicine that uses a straw, a charcoal-black stone and a glass of water to draw out poisons from a patient’s body. By poisons, I mean things like bloodstained bandages, pieces of raw meat, or even live insects that magically appear inside the glass while Bonachita blows bubbles in it. A few days later we make our way to the man’s house in Siquijor town. 

“Oh that was you!” Nong Iking (that’s “Uncle Iking,” as his friends call him) replies after I remind him of our two-decade-old connection. He then reveals that a prominent businessman contacted him soon after reading my magazine article. The person’s wife was down with a sickness no doctor could explain, and they were willing to try bolo-bolo as a last resort. During her treatment, chunks of fruit materialized in the glass—the work of a spirit that, Enrique says, was angry over the cutting of a tree in the patient’s backyard. He cured her, of course, and to this day the family remains grateful for his help.

Tradition prohibits Nong Iking from asking for money (“I will lose my gift if I do that,” he explains), but judging from his good health and his nicely made concrete house, this bolo-bolo practitioner will be serving patients for many more years. Enrique Bonachita and Ricardo Oyog are just two of the many “alternative healers” that give depth and character to this truly unique place. The fact that they are thriving gives me hope that the mananambal, the bolo-bolo, and all the other mystery men (except maybe the insidious mambabarang) will still be present when this island becomes a mainstream tourist attraction. Far from being an outdated notion, this “supernatural” connection is for the Siquijodnons to celebrate.

On my last night on the island, I walk around Lazi in search of a ghost from the past. I hunker down at Papi’s Bistro, near the spot where, not too long ago, I tried to make that ill-advised phone call. With a pint of beer in hand, I wait for that strange, coffin-carrying old man. He never appears.

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