Four days in Manila: everybody warns you about it, and everybody is half wrong

Three nights based near Intramuros, covering the walled city, the national museums, the oldest Chinatown on earth and a church made of steel.

Copy this itinerary
Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Manila
Places
10 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Manila has a reputation and most of it is earned. The traffic is among the worst anywhere, the heat is heavy, and the airport has been voted the world's worst more than once. Visitors routinely land, spend one night near the airport and fly out to an island the next morning.

That is a shame, because the city holds the oldest Chinatown on earth, four free national museums that would be ticketed anywhere else, a Gothic church prefabricated in Belgium and bolted together here, and a walled Spanish town that was 95 percent destroyed in a month of street fighting in 1945 and has been slowly putting itself back together since.

Four days is enough to see all of that without spending your life in a car, provided you base yourself in the old centre and plan around the traffic instead of ignoring it. The rule is simple: go early, stay in one district per day, and never try to cross the city between four and eight in the evening.

Highlights

  • Fort Santiago, where the national hero spent his last night before the Spanish shot him
  • The Spoliarium, four metres by seven, in a museum that costs nothing to enter
  • Binondo, founded in 1594 and the oldest Chinatown in the world, eaten street by street
  • San Sebastian, a Gothic church of riveted steel shipped from Belgium in 1891
  • Halo-halo, crushed ice, purple yam and everything else, on an afternoon at 34 degrees

Where to stay

Manila, three nights

Stay in or beside Intramuros. It is where three of the four days start, it is walkable, and the hotels inside the walls are small and characterful. Malate and Ermita, just south, are cheaper, closer to the museums and rougher around the edges after dark.

The alternative most visitors take is Makati or Bonifacio Global City, the business districts, which are safe, comfortable, full of malls and forty minutes of traffic from anything historic. If you want a night out rather than a city, that is where to be.

Day by day

Day 1 in Manila

Inside the walls

The Spanish laid out Intramuros in 1571 and ran the Philippines from inside its walls for three hundred years. In February 1945 the Japanese garrison refused to withdraw and the Americans shelled it building by building; roughly a hundred thousand civilians died in the city that month and almost nothing inside the walls survived. What you walk around now is one original church, a rebuilt cathedral, a repaired fort and a great deal of reconstruction.

Start at the fort on the river, where the Spanish held Jose Rizal, the doctor and novelist whose writing did more than anything else to start the revolution, in the days before they executed him in 1896. Brass footprints in the ground mark his last walk out to the gate.

Then the cathedral, then the recreated merchant's house, which is the only way to see what a Spanish colonial interior in this city actually looked like.

  1. 13:30

    Fort Santiago

    Other

    Open eight until six. The Rizal shrine inside holds his last poem, which he hid in an oil lamp. Allow ninety minutes and start before the tour groups at ten.

  2. 15:30

    Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception (Manila Cathedral)

    Religious

    Destroyed and rebuilt eight times since 1581, most recently in 1958. Free, and the bronze doors and the rose window are the parts worth standing still for.

  3. 16:45

    Casa Manila

    Culture

    A reconstruction of an 1850s Manila house, built in the 1980s around a real courtyard, with the furniture, the sliding capiz shell windows and the two-seat lavatory intact. An hour, and the best single explanation of colonial domestic life here.

  4. 19:00

    Dinner in Intramuros

    Eat

    The restaurants around Plaza San Luis do Filipino food in colonial courtyards. Kare-kare, crispy pata and a San Miguel, and the horse-drawn calesas wait outside afterwards.

With more time: San Agustin is a two minute walk from Casa Manila and is the one building inside the walls that survived 1945 intact, finished in 1607 and a UNESCO site. Its trompe l'oeil ceiling and the carved doors are worth going out of your way for.

Day 2 in Manila

The park where Rizal died, and three free museums

Rizal Park is where the Spanish shot him, on 30 December 1896, in front of a crowd; the monument on the seafront side marks the spot and holds his remains. The park is Manila's front lawn, sixty hectares of it, and the whole city walks in it at the weekend.

Around the northern edge stand the national museums, in the neoclassical government buildings the Americans put up in the 1920s. They are free, all of them, and the fine arts one holds a painting nobody expects: Juan Luna's Spoliarium, an enormous canvas of dead gladiators being dragged from a Roman arena, which won gold in Madrid in 1884 and which Filipino nationalists immediately read as being about themselves.

The anthropology building next door has the Manunggul burial jar and the material culture of a country with over a hundred ethnic groups. Two museums is enough for one day; the third is there if it rains.

  1. 08:30

    Rizal Park (Luneta)

    Leisure

    Walk in from the Intramuros side. The monument, the Chinese and Japanese gardens and the relief map of the archipelago are the parts to see, and it is busiest and best on a Sunday morning.

  2. 10:30

    National Museum of Fine Arts

    Culture

    Free, air-conditioned and open from nine. Go straight up to the Spoliarium in the main hall, then work back through the nineteenth-century portraits. Two hours is right.

  3. 13:00

    Lunch between the museums

    Eat

    The museum cafes are decent and the alternative is a walk into Ermita. A silog plate, garlic rice with egg and something fried, is the standard cheap lunch.

  4. 14:00

    National Museum of Anthropology

    Culture

    Across the road in the old finance building. The Manunggul jar, the boat burials and the textile collection are the highlights; the top-floor galleries on the southern Philippines are the ones people miss.

With more time: The National Museum of Natural History next door has a glass canopy over its atrium and a preserved saltwater crocodile that ate people, and Paco Park, twenty minutes east, is a circular walled cemetery from the 1820s where Rizal was buried in secret.

Day 3 in Manila

Quiapo, Binondo and a church made of steel

This is the day to eat. Binondo was set up by the Spanish in 1594 as a district for Catholic Chinese, on the far side of the river from the walled city so they could be watched, and it has been trading continuously since, which makes it the oldest Chinatown anywhere.

Start earlier and eastwards at Quiapo, where the church holds a dark wooden statue of Christ that arrived from Mexico in the seventeenth century and is the object of the most intense devotion in the country. On Fridays the square outside is packed with people selling candles, herbal remedies and fortunes.

Between the two, in a district that otherwise looks like nothing much, is a church built entirely of riveted steel. It was designed after earthquakes and fires had destroyed four previous churches on the site, prefabricated in Belgium, shipped in pieces and assembled in 1891, and it is the only one of its kind in Asia.

  1. 08:30

    Quiapo Church

    Religious

    Masses run all day and the crowds are constant. Go on a Friday morning if you can bear the crush; the plaza outside is a market of amulets, candles and traditional cures.

  2. 10:15

    San Sebastian Church

    Religious

    Fifteen minutes from Quiapo. Steel columns and vaults painted to look like marble and jasper, stained glass from Germany, and structural bolts you can put your hand on. It has been on the endangered list for years because the metal rusts.

  3. 12:00

    Binondo Church

    Religious

    Built in 1596 for Chinese converts, bombed in 1945 and rebuilt around the original octagonal bell tower. The best food streets start from its doorstep.

  4. 12:45

    Ongpin Street

    Landmark

    Chinatown's main street. Fresh lumpia, hopia, kiam pung and dumplings, sold from shophouses and carts. Work slowly north and stop whenever there is a queue; this is lunch, not a walk.

With more time: Escolta Street, one block south, was the smartest shopping street in the country in the 1930s and is now a run of faded Art Deco buildings with artist studios in them. Carvajal Street, a narrow lane off Ongpin, is the wet market where Binondo actually shops.

Day 4 in Manila

A walled cemetery, then the airport

Paco Park is a small circular cemetery the Dominicans built in the 1820s for Spanish families, with the graves set in niches in a double ring of walls and a chapel in the middle. When Rizal was executed, the Spanish buried him here without a marker, and his sister found the grave by bribing the gravedigger.

It is now a garden with concerts in it on Friday evenings, and at nine in the morning it is empty. Half an hour there and a proper Filipino breakfast is the right last morning, because you will then need every remaining minute for the airport.

  1. 07:30

    Tapsilog breakfast

    Eat

    Cured beef, garlic fried rice and a fried egg, with vinegar to cut it, and thick sweet coffee. Every neighbourhood has a place doing it from six in the morning.

  2. 09:00

    Paco Park

    Historic

    Open from six, small entrance fee, and almost nobody there. The circular walls, the ring of grave niches and the chapel take half an hour, and the marker where Rizal lay is on the inner wall.

  3. 11:00

    To Ninoy Aquino

    Travel

    Ten kilometres and anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes. Confirm your terminal number before you set off, because they are far apart and moving between them means going back out onto the road.

With more time: With a later flight, the Metropolitan Theater near the post office is a 1931 Art Deco building that reopened after a long restoration, and Bahay Tsinoy in Intramuros covers the four centuries of Chinese life in the Philippines properly.

Before you go

Traffic, and how to beat it

This is the single thing that decides whether four days in Manila works. Journeys that look like fifteen minutes take an hour between 07:00 and 10:00 and again between 16:00 and 20:00, and no app can route around it because the whole grid is full.

So group your days by district: Intramuros one day, Rizal Park and the museums another, Binondo and Quiapo a third. Use Grab, which is metered and honest, or the LRT-1 elevated line, which runs down the western side of the city and is fast, cheap and packed. Jeepneys are cheap and slow and a genuine experience once.

Getting in and out

Ninoy Aquino International has four terminals that are not usefully connected to each other, so check which one you need and leave three hours for an international departure. It is 10 kilometres from Intramuros and that can mean 30 minutes or 90.

Domestic flights to Cebu, Palawan and Bohol go from Terminals 2, 3 and 4 and are cheap and frequent. Book the first flight of the day; delays compound as the day goes on.

Eating

Filipino food is sour, salty and sweet rather than spicy. Adobo is meat braised in vinegar, soy and garlic; sinigang is a sour tamarind broth; kare-kare is oxtail in peanut sauce with fermented shrimp paste on the side; lechon is whole roast pig and the Philippines does it better than anyone.

Binondo is the best eating in the city and the cheapest: fresh lumpia, hopia pastries, dumplings and noodles, all in a few blocks. For dessert there is halo-halo, a glass of shaved ice, evaporated milk, sweet beans, jelly, purple yam and a scoop of ice cream, mixed together before you eat it.

Weather, money and safety

The dry season runs December to May and December to February is the coolest. June to November is the rainy season and also typhoon season, when the city floods quickly; check the forecast and keep a day flexible.

The peso is cash for markets and jeepneys, card elsewhere. Petty theft in crowds is the main risk, so keep phones out of sight on jeepneys and around Quiapo, and use Grab rather than street taxis, which overcharge. The city is fine to walk in daylight in the districts on this route.

Manila does not sell itself. It has no skyline you photograph, no old quarter that survived intact, and a commute that will test anyone's patience. What it has is depth: a Spanish fort, an American museum quarter, a Chinese district four centuries old, and a church made of Belgian steel, all in about four square kilometres.

Give it three nights, walk in the morning, eat in Binondo, and leave for the islands afterwards with a better idea of what the country is.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

Is Manila worth visiting?
For three or four days, and only if you accept it on its terms. It is not a pretty city and it will not charm you at first sight. It has the oldest Chinatown in the world, the best free museums in Southeast Asia, and a history that explains the whole country, and none of that is visible from a hotel near the airport.
Where should I stay in Manila?
Intramuros or the streets just south of it if you are here for the city itself, since almost everything on this route starts there and you can walk. Makati or Bonifacio Global City if you want restaurants, bars and a comfortable base, and are willing to lose an hour each way in traffic.
Is Manila safe for tourists?
In the districts on this route, in daylight, yes, with normal city caution. Pickpocketing in crowds around Quiapo and on jeepneys is common; visible phones and jewellery invite it. Use Grab instead of hailing taxis, and take advice locally about which neighbourhoods to avoid after dark.
How do I deal with the traffic?
Plan one district a day, start before eight, and do not attempt a cross-city journey between four and eight in the evening. The LRT-1 elevated line is immune to it and runs past Intramuros, Rizal Park and Binondo, so use it for the north to south moves.
Where should I go after Manila?
Cebu is an hour's flight and gives you an old Spanish port and the islands beyond it. Vigan, eight hours north by bus, is the best preserved Spanish colonial town in Asia. Copy this itinerary into the planner and add whichever leg you want on the end.