Manila
The Philippines' capital and dense bayside core
Manila is the crowded, fast-talking heart of the Philippines, the historic city at the center of a metropolitan region of nearly fifteen million on the shore of a great natural bay. Among the most densely populated cities on Earth, it fuses Spanish colonial churches, American-era boulevards, glittering casinos, and improvised neighborhoods into one ceaseless tropical sprawl. Jeepneys, the flamboyant repurposed jeeps that serve as buses, are its mascots and its bloodstream.
The city sits on the eastern shore of Manila Bay where the Pasig River, dividing the city in two, empties into the South China Sea on the island of Luzon. Low and flat, only a dozen metres above sea level, it endures a tropical climate punctuated by the typhoons that sweep the western Pacific from roughly June to November, and it faces chronic flooding and ground subsidence. The bay itself is famed for sunsets and notorious for pollution.
A Muslim settlement at the mouth of the Pasig predated the arrival of the Spanish, who under Miguel Lopez de Legazpi seized the site in 1571 and built the walled fortress city of Intramuros, capital of their Pacific empire and a terminus of the Manila galleon trade with Mexico. The city passed to the United States in 1898 and was devastated in fierce 1945 fighting. Today greater Manila is the political, commercial, and cultural engine of the Philippines, a hub of business-process outsourcing and overseas-worker remittances.