Vigan Cathedral: its freestanding bell tower, built apart so an earthquake couldn’t bring down both, was itself damaged by one in 2022

On Burgos Street, in Vigan, in the province of Ilocos Sur, in the Philippines, the metropolitan cathedral of Saint Paul is the seat of the archdiocese of Nueva Segovia. That was one of the first four Philippine dioceses, erected on 14 August 1595 by Pope Clement VIII together with Manila, Cebu and Nueva Cáceres, under the first bishop, Miguel de Benavides. The original seat stood in the town of Nueva Segovia, at the mouth of the Cagayan river, gradually destroyed by the flooding of the river and moved provisionally to Lal-lo before settling definitively at Vigan on 7 September 1758. A first church of wood and thatch was built in 1574 at the wish of the conquistador Juan de Salcedo and the Augustinian friar Alonso de Álvarado, the first parish of northern Luzon. The plan for a permanent building, agreed in 1575, was slowed by the withdrawal of the Augustinians from the region in 1577; a church was finally completed by 1641, after earthquake damage in 1619 and in 1627, only to be damaged by fire in 1739 and rebuilt. The present building, the fourth on the same site, was commissioned in 1786 by Governor General José de Basco and built by the Augustinians between 1790 and 1800; the name of the architect is not documented in any source. The style, known as earthquake baroque, typical of the colonial Philippines, combines massive buttresses with decorative elements that are Gothic Revival, Romanesque and Chinese in influence. Its distinctive feature is the freestanding bell tower, raised apart from the church, about ten metres away, on Plaza Burgos, precisely according to the logic of earthquake baroque, so that the collapse of one structure would not bring down the other: an octagonal tower of three storeys, about twenty-five metres high, topped by a bronze weathervane in the shape of a cockerel, the symbol of Saint Peter. No damage to the cathedral during the Second World War is documented. An earlier claim to that effect, found during the research, in fact referred to the nearby church of Bantay, a separate building, and Vigan as a whole was spared wartime destruction, according to some sources thanks in part to the mediation of a local priest with the Japanese forces. On 27 July 2022 an earthquake of magnitude 7.0, with its epicentre in the province of Abra, badly damaged both the front of the cathedral and the freestanding bell tower, which led to the closing of the building under a Code Red alert while structural checks were made. The mayor of Vigan announced a restoration fund of about one hundred million pesos for the cathedral, the bell tower and the archbishop’s palace, work that according to a United Nations report of 2024 was given priority over the restoration of the private heritage houses of the town. The historic town of Vigan, of which the cathedral is an integral part together with the archbishop’s palace and the civic buildings that define the two central squares, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999, recognised as the best preserved example of a planned Spanish colonial town in Asia.