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Get to Know Philippines
Many places in the world have been called "a land of
contrasts", but of all the countries in South East Asia, it is Philippines which most deserves this title. Philippines is made up of several thousands islands, 14 regions and 74 provinces under umbrella of a single state. The enormously fragmented nature of the country has an influence on its history, culture and political development. The name is in itself significant and illustrates the dilemma of national identity which results from centuries of dependency. Even though the 300 years of Spanish colonial rule ended nearly a century ago, Philippines still clings to the name of the Spanish King, Philip II, who made this distant archipelago into a bastion of Christianity in Asia. Nevertheless, since the People’s Power revolution of 1986 galvanized the population, a wholly new self-awareness has seized the inhabitants of "Philip’s Islands’.
The Americans also stamped 50 years of influence on the Philippines after the disintegrated of the Spanish empire. They left a deep impression, all in the name of progress, and in the cultural melting-pot of today it has survived in a more lasting way than has the Spanish legacy.
The superficially western elements
encountered in these Fas Eastern islands has made them
both attractive and deceptive to the visitor from Europe,
America or Australia. The people and even the the
pre-Hispanic people of these islands are called the
Filipinos and Filipinas.
The Philippine archipelago is indeed a fabulous
phenomenon, lying on the eastern edge of the south China
Sea between longitudes 1160 55’ and 1270 36’
east and between latitudes 40 23’ and 210 25’
north of the equator, islands of every size and shape,
rising as atolls out of the turquoise blue water or
towering skywards with rugged mountain ranges and mighlty
volcanoes, isles like paradise and bright coral reefs,
evergreen rain-forest and sweeping plains. Some of the
islands are so large that they are inhabited by several
tribes.
However, the vast majority of the islands
which make up the archipelago are mere suggestions of
land, scarcely more than nesting sites, only visible as
sandbanks or rocky reefs above the high water mark. In
1939, a zealous civil servant took on the task of
counting every single island and the final total came to
an impressive 7,107! Only about 2,000 of the islands are
inhabited, and some 2,700 have been given names over the
centuries. This fragmented nation covers a total land
area of 300,000 sq km, making it about as large as Italy
or Poland. But about 94 per cent is accounted for by just
eleven islands ie Luzon in the north, Mindanao in the
south, Palawan in the southwest, and in between these,
Mindoro, Masbate, Samar, Leyte, Panay, Negros, Cebu and
Bohol.
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