Mactan
— — the island where Magellan stopped.
Not only on a wall.
“A coral island across the channel from Cebu, low and flat where the rest of the country rises. The reefs are the draw now: diving, boats, salt-bleached resorts along the eastern shore. The history is older. On 27 April 1521 the chief Lapu-Lapu turned Magellan's circumnavigation back into a story about local hands, on a beach the city has since built around.
Mactan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mactan is a low coral island in Cebu Province, in the central Visayas region of the Philippines. The island covers about 65 square kilometres and is connected to Cebu City by two bridges across the narrow Mactan Channel. Most of its land area is divided between Lapu-Lapu City and the municipality of Cordova. Mactan-Cebu International Airport is the country's second-busiest, handling the bulk of international arrivals into the central Philippines, and the eastern shore is lined with beach resorts on a fringing reef.
Mactan's year turns on 27 April. On that morning in 1521 the chief Lapu-Lapu and his warriors met Ferdinand Magellan's landing party in the shallows off Punta Engaño and killed the Portuguese navigator there, ending his attempt to claim the islands for Spain. The date is now Adlaw ni Lapu-Lapu, a Lapu-Lapu City holiday, and the Kadaugan sa Mactan festival re-enacts the battle on the beach each year. The bronze statue of Lapu-Lapu on the shrine grounds was raised in the twentieth century and remains the island's most visited monument.
The reefs off Mactan's eastern shore are part of one of the richest marine systems in the Visayan Sea. Dive sites cluster around Marigondon, Olango Island, and the Hilutungan Channel, with sardine balls, thresher sharks in deeper water, and reef walls that drop fast off the shelf. The Olango Island Wildlife Sanctuary, a Ramsar wetland, protects mudflats that are a staging site for migratory shorebirds along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. The water reads turquoise close in and indigo over the drop-off.