The last time I was in Iloilo City, I didn’t see much of it at all. It rained the entire two days I was there, hard enough that I got sick and spent most of the trip staring at a hotel ceiling. So when a work commitment brought me back and it turned out I only needed two hours of it, I didn’t waste time being grateful. I had a full day ahead, and I meant to use it.
Twenty-four hours isn’t enough to know a city. But it’s enough to get a real sense of it, especially one like Iloilo, where a Gothic church still rings its original bells a short drive from a business district, and where every few blocks seem to hold a family-run stall selling something you’ll be thinking about for weeks.
This is what I did with mine: a morning with Molo’s heritage and an afternoon and evening in Iloilo Business Park, and a growing list of things I’m already planning to come back for.
Molo, on a better day this time
I started at Molo Church, officially the Sta. Ana Parish Church, and one of the reasons people call Iloilo the City of Love and Heritage. Built in 1831 and completed in Gothic-Renaissance style, it’s often described as the only church of its kind in the country outside Manila, its coral stone facade rising into twin red spires that you can spot from blocks away. Inside, the church is known as the “feminist church,” lined with statues of female saints along the pillars leading to the altar, with St. Anne, the patron saint of Molo, at the center.
It was declared a National Historical Landmark in 1992, and it’s survived fires, earthquakes, and the Second World War, when it served as an evacuation center for civilians. I lit a candle, sat for a while, and let that history settle before stepping back into the morning heat.
From the church, it’s a short walk to Molo Plaza, where the day was already in motion. Students clustered on benches before their next class, vendors set up carts of taho and boiled peanuts, and a handful of tourists wandered around with their phones out, doing exactly what I was doing. It’s a small plaza, but it holds a real cross section of Molo life, not staged for visitors, just going about its Tuesday.
Across the street is Molo Mansion, also known as the Yusay-Consing Mansion, built in 1926 by Doña Petra Lacson and her husband, Judge Estanislao Yusay. It later passed to their daughter Rosario and her husband, Timoteo Consing Sr., who served as Iloilo governor in the 1930s.
The house is a study in American colonial architecture with neoclassical and art deco touches, and while the upper floors aren’t open to the public,
But first, food and pasalubong
Visiting Molo Mansion also allows you to buy your pasalubong and try on some local Iloilo food if you are in a hurry.
The ground floor holds Kultura, where I picked up a couple of shirts, and a cluster of stalls run by local food makers.
This is where the day slowed down, in the best way. The pasalubong stalls, cafes, and eateries around Molo Mansion are almost entirely homegrown brands: I stopped at The Local House for some pasalubong snacks, picked up a bag of native cacao and freshly brewed coffee beans from a small counter near the entrance.
Lunch was about pancit molo, the dish the district is named for. Despite the name, there are no noodles in it. It’s a clear, savory broth studded with dumplings, called molo balls, made from ground pork or chicken wrapped in the same wrapper used for wontons, a legacy of the Chinese traders and settlers who moved through Molo generations ago.
I had mine at Luna’s Ilonggo Delicacy, one of the food stalls beside the mansion, the broth still steaming and the wrapper soft enough to fall apart at the first spoonful. Vendors here have been perfecting their own versions for decades.
For some local family businesses, pancit molo started as a home recipe sold from a pot carried door to door, one ladle at a time, before it grew into a proper stall business, and that kind of small-scale, family-built story is common to most of the pancit molo you’ll find around Molo today. I promised myself to try some more in my next visit.
It made me think of the last time Iloilo fed me this well, on an earlier trip before the rain ruined things, when I’d made the requisite to try a bowl of La Paz batchoy, albeit being sick.
The two dishes make a good pair for understanding Iloilo’s food identity: pancit molo is a wonton soup with Chinese roots reworked into something distinctly Molo, while batchoy, a noodle soup built on pork broth, innards, and crushed chicharon, was reportedly first sold from a cart in the La Paz Public Market in the late 1930s by a local butcher, before spreading to become the dish most Filipinos associate with Iloilo.
And as Iloilo holds the title of a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, I need more days to try other local food, for sure.
Checking in to modern Iloilo
From Molo, I made my way to Iloilo Business Park, Megaworld’s township on the other side of the city. The contrast is immediate. Where Molo is coral stone and family-run food stalls, IBP is glass facades and planned green spaces, a version of Iloilo built in the last decade rather than the last two centuries. Both felt like the city, just at different points in its timeline.
I checked in at Richmonde Hotel Iloilo, where I got a room with a view of the Iloilo Convention Centre, a 1.7-hectare land that celebrates Iloilo’s modern architecture and is home to various events.
Richmonde Hotel earned its keep fast: the room was spacious enough to spread out a laptop and a carry-on luggage bag without either fighting for space, which matters more than most business travelers admit.
Dinner at The Granary was steak, a side salad, and crispy pork that didn’t need the accompanying sauce to make its case. I only found out afterward that the hotel is recognized for its Muslim-friendly accommodations, from Qibla-marked rooms to halal-conscious menu options, a small detail that says more about the property’s actual hospitality than any amenity list could.
Paintings and brandy
I spent the afternoon at ILOMOCA, the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 2018 as the first museum in the Visayas and Mindanao dedicated to modern art.
It sits inside the Casa de Emperador building, three floors and roughly 3,000 square meters of exhibition space.
There I met local artist Marrz Capanang, whose solo show at the museum’s Hulot Gallery explores myth, animism, and kinship, and who has spent over a decade weaving the Hiligaynon language into his visual work through his community project.
I got to speak with him briefly about how the museum has changed the way Ilonggo artists get seen outside Manila and his vision for local artists to gain more opportunities to showcase their work.
Right next door is the Brandy Museum, which opened in January 2022 as the Philippines’ first and only museum dedicated to brandy. The space is designed to feel like a working bodega in Spain: sloped ceilings, exposed oak trellis, dim atmospheric lighting, and a timeline that traces brandy back to 711 A.D., when the Moors first discovered wine distillation. Between the two museums, I spent close to two hours without meaning to.
Festive Walk after dark
Back to the hotel and after a couple of hours of rest, I went outside and it’s already evening. The business park had shifted into a different rhythm. I walked through Festive Walk and its K-Town strip, where the smell of Korean barbecue competed with fairy lights strung between the shopfronts, and ended the night the way I end most nights when I travel alone: with coffee, sitting somewhere I could watch people pass.
Twenty four hours in, and Iloilo had already given me two versions of itself. One built by Chinese settlers, Spanish friars, and generations of families selling food out of carts and small stalls. One built by a conglomerate in the last ten years.
If anything, moving between them in a single day was the clearest picture I got of how the city actually works: old and new, a few kilometers and a few centuries apart, both still very much alive, and both still fed by people who started small.
I know I missed plenty. Jaro Cathedral and its belfry. The Calle Real heritage strip downtown. The Iloilo River Esplanade at sunset. A slower afternoon at Molo Mansion’s food stalls instead of a rushed lunch. And maybe a return day trip out to Miag-ao town, about 40 minutes south of the city, where the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Miagao Church still stands watch over the plaza, is already going on the list for next time.
Twenty four hours was never going to be enough, and I went in knowing that.
Still, I’m grateful for the two hours of work that turned into a day I actually got to spend outside a hotel room this time. Next time, I’m asking for more than 24 hours.
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