Calatagan, from the record

01 Before the municipality

Burials, pottery and a trading coast

In 1958 a National Museum team led by the anthropologist Robert B. Fox excavated burial grounds at two sites in Calatagan, Kay Tomas and Pulong Bakaw. Fox published the results the following year as two fifteenth-century burial sites. ^{Sources 1,2,3}

At Pulong Bakaw alone, 207 graves were excavated. They date to the late fourteenth and early-to-mid fifteenth centuries, and held Siamese, Sawankhalok and Annamese wares — pottery made in mainland Southeast Asia — alongside earthenware made locally. ^{Source 4}

A later study of Philippine burial goods treats the Calatagan excavations as the clearest record of trade with other Southeast Asian polities before the Spanish galleon trade. ^{Source 4}

The local earthenware was sorted by Dorothy Main, the museum’s honorary curator of ceramics, into a Kay Tomas complex, a Pulong Bakaw complex and intrusive wares. Fox and Main published a full description as a National Museum monograph in 1982. ^{Sources 2,3}

The best-known object from Calatagan was not found by the museum team. Diggers found a small earthenware pot at an archaeological site in Calatagan in 1958; it passed to the Anthropological Foundation of the Philippines, which gave it to the National Museum in 1961. It stands 12 centimetres high and has been dated to between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. ^{Sources 5,6}

Disputed Around the pot’s shoulder runs an inscription in a pre-Hispanic script, and scholars do not agree on what it says. Ramon Guillermo and Myfel Joseph Paluga published a Visayan-language reading in 2011; Rolando Borrinaga proposed another, and reviewed earlier attempts that reached different conclusions. We present none of them as settled. ^{Sources 5,6,7}

02 Hacienda de Calatagan

A town that was almost entirely one estate

By the late nineteenth century nearly all of Calatagan belonged to one family. Writing in 1895, the Spanish official Manuel Sastrón recorded that most of the town’s farmland and all of its forests were owned by Pedro P. Roxas, and that the Roxas house had been milling sugar there with steam machinery for more than forty years. ^{Source 8}

Sugar was the town’s only significant export, shipped from two anchorages Sastrón names as Balongbato and Calabozo. The Roxas hacienda house, he noted, rivalled the town hall as the most prominent building in the place. ^{Source 8}

Attributed How the Roxas family came to hold the land is less well documented. The municipality’s former website says Domingo Roxas acquired it from the Spanish Crown in 1829, and that in 1931 the estate passed to the brothers Jacobo and Alfonso Zobel. We have not found records that confirm either date. ^{Source 9}

The estate’s later history is in the court record. In 1965 the Supreme Court decided a case the Republic brought against Ayala y Cía., Alfonso Zobel and others over Hacienda Calatagan, whose title covered some 9,652 hectares. It upheld findings that land added to the hacienda’s survey plan was foreshore, beach or navigable water, and ordered that land returned to the public domain. ^{Source 10}

03 Becoming Calatagan

Separated from Balayan — twice

Calatagan was a town before it was a municipality in the modern sense. Sastrón lists it in 1895 among the twenty-two pueblos of Batangas — the least populated, with 2,239 inhabitants — and notes that it had only just become a parish of its own, having been served until then from Balayan. ^{Source 8}

In October 1903 the Philippine Commission’s Act No. 958 cut the province’s twenty-two municipalities to sixteen. Calatagan and Tuy were folded into Balayan, with the seat of government at Balayan. ^{Source 11}

Eight years later, inhabitants of what the order calls “the former municipality of Calatagan” petitioned to separate, promising to build a municipal building and schoolhouses and to repair the roads. Executive Order No. 78, signed by Governor-General W. Cameron Forbes on 16 December 1911, restored Calatagan to the territory it had held before Act No. 958, with effect from 1 January 1912. Its text survives in two independent reproductions, one English and one Spanish, which agree. ^{Sources 9,11,12}

This is why accounts of Calatagan’s beginnings differ. Those that say it became a municipality in 1912 are right about the present municipality, but the order itself describes a restoration of an earlier one rather than a new creation. ^{Sources 8,9,12}

04 Cape Santiago

A light for ships bound for Manila

The historical marker the National Historical Commission of the Philippines placed at Cape Santiago in 2018 records that the site was first surveyed and proposed in 1887, and that Aldecoa y Cía. built the lighthouse of brick to a design by Guillermo Brockman in 1890. It served, the marker says, as a guide for ships bound for the port of Manila. ^{Source 13}

It was in service by 1895, when Sastrón described a road to Punta Santiago, where there was a semaphore and a fourth-order lighthouse. ^{Source 8}

05 Calatagan today

A first-class municipality of 25 barangays

The 2024 census counted 60,420 people in Calatagan’s 25 barangays. ^{Source 14}

In the first general income reclassification under Republic Act No. 11964, Calatagan moved from second to first class, with effect from 1 January 2025. ^{Source 15}

• Population and barangays
• Municipal finances
• Full Disclosure filings
• Government

At a glance

Timeline

1. Late 14th – mid 15th century

   Burials at Pulong Bakaw, with pottery traded from mainland Southeast Asia. ^{Source 4}

2. 1829

   Domingo Roxas acquires the land that becomes Hacienda de Calatagan. ^{Source 9} Attributed Municipality’s former website; not independently confirmed.

3. By the mid-1850s

   The Roxas house introduces steam-powered sugar milling in Calatagan. ^{Source 8}

4. 1887

   Cape Santiago is surveyed and proposed as a lighthouse site. ^{Source 13}

5. 1890

   The Cape Santiago lighthouse is built, of brick, by Aldecoa y Cía. ^{Source 13}

6. 1895

   Calatagan is the least populated of Batangas’s 22 pueblos, with 2,239 inhabitants. ^{Source 8}

7. 23 October 1903

   Act No. 958 merges Calatagan and Tuy into Balayan. ^{Source 11}

8. 16 December 1911

   Executive Order No. 78 restores Calatagan as a separate municipality. ^{Sources 9,12}

9. 1 January 1912

   The separation from Balayan takes effect. ^{Sources 9,12}

10. 1931

    The hacienda passes from the Roxas family to the Zobel brothers. ^{Source 9} Attributed Municipality’s former website; not independently confirmed.

11. 1958

    Robert B. Fox’s National Museum team excavates Kay Tomas and Pulong Bakaw; the Calatagan Pot is found. ^{Sources 1,5}

12. 1961

    The Calatagan Pot is donated to the National Museum. ^{Source 5}

13. 31 May 1965

    The Supreme Court returns foreshore and sea areas claimed within Hacienda Calatagan to the public domain. ^{Source 10}

14. 2018

    The National Historical Commission places a marker at the Cape Santiago lighthouse. ^{Source 13}

15. 1 July 2024

    The census counts 60,420 residents. ^{Source 14}

16. 1 January 2025

    Calatagan becomes a first-class municipality. ^{Source 15}

Sources

Where this comes from

Primary documents, government records and peer-reviewed scholarship come first. Where only a source’s bibliographic details could be confirmed, the note says so.

1. Peer-reviewed

   The Calatagan Excavations: Two 15th Century Burial Sites in Batangas, Philippines

   Philippine Studies 7(3), Ateneo de Manila University , 1959. DOI 10.13185/2244-1638.3148. Consulted 2026-09-24.

   Bibliographic details confirmed through Crossref and Solheim (1985). The article text itself was not retrievable to this project.

2. Peer-reviewed

   Robert B. Fox, 1918–1985

   Asian Perspectives 26(1), University of Hawai‘i Press , 1985. Bibliography of Robert B. Fox, entries for 1959, 1961 and 1982. Consulted 2026-09-24.

3. Peer-reviewed

   Finds and Analysis of Five Archaeological Pottery Sites in the Philippines

   SPAFA Journal 6(1), SEAMEO Regional Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts . Section "Calatagan Pottery". Consulted 2026-09-24.

4. Peer-reviewed

   Burial Goods in the Philippines: An Attempt to Quantify Prestige Values

   Southeast Asian Studies 41(3), Kyoto University , 2003. Section 7, "Pulong Bakaw, Calatagan". Consulted 2026-09-24.

5. Government publication

   In Focus: The Mystery of the Ancient Inscription (an article on the Calatagan Pot), by Rolando O. Borrinaga

   National Commission for Culture and the Arts , 2010. Published 22 September 2010. Consulted 2026-09-24.

6. Secondary source

   The Calatagan Pot: A National Treasure with Bisayan Inscription

   Paper presented at the Philippine National Historical Society 31st National Conference on Local and National History , 2010. Section reviewing earlier attempts at decipherment. Consulted 2026-09-24.

7. Peer-reviewed

   Barang king banga: A Visayan language reading of the Calatagan pot inscription (CPI)

   Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 42(1): 121–159, Cambridge University Press , 2011. DOI 10.1017/s0022463410000561. Consulted 2026-09-24.

   Bibliographic details confirmed through Crossref. The article is paywalled; its argument is cited here only as a proposed reading.

8. Primary document

   Filipinas: pequeños estudios. Batangas y su provincia

   Manuel Sastrón; Malabon: Asilo de Huérfanos (digitised by the Internet Archive) , 1895. Entry "Calatagan", and the general sections on agriculture and on the province’s pueblos. Consulted 2026-09-24.

9. Archived official website

   History — Municipal Government of Calatagan

   Municipal Government of Calatagan (archived by the Internet Archive, 13 July 2022) , 2022. Includes a Spanish text of Executive Order No. 78, credited to the Gaceta Oficial. Consulted 2026-09-24.

10. Government record

    Republic of the Philippines v. Ayala y Cía., et al., G.R. No. L-20950

    Supreme Court of the Philippines (text via LawPhil) , 1965. Decided 31 May 1965. Consulted 2026-09-24.

11. Government record

    Act No. 958: An Act Reducing the Twenty-Two Municipalities of the Province of Batangas to Sixteen

    Philippine Commission (text via the Supreme Court E-Library) , 1903. Section 2; enacted 23 October 1903. Consulted 2026-09-24.

12. Secondary source

    Executive Order No. 78 Separating Calatagan from the Municipality of Balayan

    Batangas History, Culture and Folklore, reproducing Executive Orders Nos. 1–86 (1911) , 2018. Consulted 2026-09-24.

    A reproduction. The original printed volume sits behind bot protection at the digital libraries that hold it.

13. Photograph of a marker

    Parola ng Cape Santiago — historical marker

    National Historical Commission of the Philippines; read from a photograph by Ervin Malicdem (CC BY-SA 4.0), taken 15 April 2018 , 2018. Consulted 2026-09-24.

14. Government record

    2024 Census of Population, CALABARZON by barangay

    Philippine Statistics Authority, OpenSTAT , 2024. Consulted 2026-09-24.

15. Government record

    BLGF Memorandum Circular No. 020.2024, Annex A

    Bureau of Local Government Finance, Department of Finance , 2024. Annex A, page 13 of 32. Consulted 2026-09-24.