Ten days in the Philippines: skip the islands once and see the country instead

Everything in Intramuros is within a few hundred metres and almost all of it is reconstruction, because of what happened here in 1945. Start at the fort on the river, where the Spanish held Jose Rizal, the doctor and novelist whose writing did more than anything to start the revolution, in the days before they shot him. Brass footprints in the ground mark his last walk out to the gate.

Then the cathedral, and then the one building inside the walls that came through the war intact: a Spanish Baroque church finished in 1607, with a painted trompe l'oeil ceiling and carved wooden doors, now a UNESCO site.

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

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

This is the day to eat, but start earlier and further east. Quiapo 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.

Fifteen minutes away, in a district that looks like nothing much, stands a church built entirely of riveted steel. Four previous churches on the site had been destroyed by earthquake and fire, so this one was prefabricated in Belgium, shipped in pieces and bolted together in 1891, and it is the only one of its kind in Asia.

Then Binondo, which the Spanish established in 1594 for Catholic Chinese on the far side of the river so they could be watched, and which has traded continuously since, making it the oldest Chinatown anywhere.

An hour and twenty minutes south, then 30 to 60 minutes across the bridge from Mactan into the city. Take a morning flight and the afternoon is yours.

Magellan reached Cebu in April 1521, converted the local ruler and his household, gave them a small wooden image of the infant Jesus as a baptism gift, and six weeks later was killed in the shallows off Mactan by a chief who had declined to convert. The image survived, was found undamaged by Spanish soldiers in the ruins of a burned village 44 years later, and is now venerated by more people than any other object in the country.

It and the cross he is said to have planted stand within four hundred metres of each other, which makes the first afternoon easy.

Carbon is the largest market in the Visayas and it starts before five. Fish, rice, mangoes, live chickens, flowers, brooms, spread over several blocks and entirely unbothered by visitors. Go at six, keep your phone in your pocket, buy fruit, and be out before the heat.

Then the house. The Yap-Sandiego was built by a Chinese merchant in the seventeenth century of coral blocks and hardwood, and it is still owned and lived in by descendants of the family, which is why it feels like a home rather than an exhibit.

Finish at the fort on the water, which the Spanish began in 1738 and which is the smallest in the Philippines.

Casa Gorordo belonged to the family of the first Filipino bishop of Cebu and has been restored properly, with capiz shell windows, a working kitchen, good interpretation and a courtyard cafe. At nine in the morning you will have it to yourself.

Cebu's Chinese community predates the Spanish, and its temple sits up in a wealthy subdivision north of the centre at the top of ninety-nine steps. It is bright, quiet and open to anyone; devotees have their fortunes read by dropping wooden blocks on the floor.

In the evening go further up the same mountain, where a walled terrace at 600 metres has the whole of Cebu and Mactan laid out below it.

Fifty minutes across the Visayan Sea. Iloilo's airport is 20 kilometres north of the city and the transfer takes about 45 minutes.

Calle Real was the smartest shopping street in the provinces for sixty years. The buildings went up between the 1890s and the 1930s for Chinese and mestizo trading houses, and they run from Spanish neoclassical through American beaux-arts into full art deco with curved corners and vertical fins. A conservation ordinance in 2010 stopped anybody painting over them.

At the bottom of the street is the customs house the Americans built in 1916 to handle the sugar, and beyond it the river walk where the whole city goes in the evening.

Molo was the Chinese mestizo quarter and it has the best church in the city: coral stone, twin spires, Gothic arches and sixteen statues of female saints down the nave, which is why locals call it the feminist church.

A few streets away is a house from 1865, stone below and hardwood above, which the family still owns and runs as a small museum where they make thick tsokolate on a wood stove and serve it with rice cakes. It is the most enjoyable hour in the city.

In the afternoon go north to Jaro, the sugar families' district, where the cathedral's belfry stands on its own across the plaza, shaken off its church by earthquakes, and the streets around it hold the mansions the mill owners built in the 1920s and 1930s.

Go to La Paz market for breakfast, because that is where batchoy was invented in the 1930s and the original stalls are still there. Pork and beef offal, round miki noodles, a bone and shrimp broth, fried garlic and crushed pork crackling on top, eaten at seven in the morning by people going to work.

Then two museums that between them explain the whole city. The Western Visayas branch of the national museum occupies the 1911 provincial jail and covers the archaeology of Panay and the sugar economy, cell blocks and all. The economic history museum a few streets away, in a restored 1920s trading house, is the better of the two and covers how sugar and abaca built this place and then left it.

Buy mangoes. The ones from Guimaras, fifteen minutes across the strait, are the sweetest in the Philippines and locals will tell you so within ten minutes of meeting you; dried, they travel.

The central market is five minutes from the old commercial street and is the last cheap, loud, useful hour of the trip. Then the airport, which takes rather longer to reach than the distance suggests.