- The Concrete Canopy: What are we actually celebrating this Baguio Day? - September 2, 2026
- Electric Jeepneys: The long-term answer to rising oil prices - August 24, 2026
- The road to nowhere: When process fails, watersheds pay - May 4, 2026
Another year older, another layer of asphalt poured.
As Baguio marks another Charter Day, the city’s official narrative will inevitably lean back on its favorite comfort blankets: postcard memories of a misty American-era hill station, romanticized pine-scented breezes, and the resilient spirit of the highlands. But step outside
City Hall or peer down from any ridge, and the romanticism hits a hard, gray wall of concrete.
The real question we should be asking as the city turns a year older isn’t how much we’ve grown, but how much of our soul we are paving over to get there. For decades, Baguio’s identity has been anchored to its environment. We are defined by the whispering pine trees that once blanketed every hill, the watersheds that feed our springs, and the cool mountain air that serves as our ultimate sanctuary. Yet, every passing year feels less like a celebration of our heritage and more like an inventory of our ecological losses.
Look around. Green spaces are no longer a given; they are a besieged luxury. Every remaining patch of earth, every contested slope, and every shrinking watershed seems to be locked in a quiet, losing war against high-rise commercialization, parking expansions, and
unchecked real estate development. We watch developers chop down decades-old pines with bureaucratic permits in hand, replacing living canopies with multi-story monoliths that throw long, cold shadows over a congested city.
There is a glaring irony in celebrating a mountain resort city while choking on vehicular emissions and watching our hillsides slowly lose their grip. We boast of being a UNESCO Creative City, yet we struggle to protect the very landscapes that inspired generations of local artists, writers, and indigenous communities in the first place.
Development is inevitable, yes. Progress cannot be frozen in 1909. But the kind of progress Baguio has blindly embraced lately looks less like growth and more like urban suffocation.
We are trading long-term ecological survival for short-term economic gains, squeezing more bodies, cars, and concrete into a basin that has long breached its carrying capacity.
This Baguio Day, let us drop the tired pretense that everything is fine as long as the strawberries are sweet and the weather dips below 20 degrees. A true resident’s love for this city isn’t measured by how loudly we cheer during parades, but by how fiercely we fight to
keep the city breathable.
If we truly want a reason to celebrate next year, we need to stop treating our remaininggreen spaces as mere real estate waiting to be converted. Because if we keep trading our pine trees for pavement, the day will come when there is nothing left of Baguio to celebrate,
save for the memory of what we allowed ourselves to lose. Farrell Ventigan
