Muntinlupa
— — the city the lake still touches.
Not only on a wall.
“The southernmost city of Metro Manila, where the long shore of Laguna de Bay finally meets the capital. Alabang's office towers rise above what was, a generation ago, mostly fishponds and rice. Older neighbourhoods along the lake still keep small boats. The city carries both at once — the new business district and the slow shoreline — without choosing between them.
Muntinlupa, 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.
Muntinlupa sits at the southern edge of Metro Manila, bordered on the east by Laguna de Bay and on the south by Laguna Province. The 2020 census recorded a population of about 543,000 across an area of roughly 41 square kilometres. The city is one of the original component cities of the National Capital Region. Its name is folk-etymologised from muntik na malibing, meaning almost buried, a story tied to the soft lakeside ground the older barangays were built on. The form Munting Lupa, small land, also appears in earlier records.
Laguna de Bay is the largest lake in the Philippines, covering about 949 square kilometres, and Muntinlupa holds a long stretch of its western shore. Fishponds and small boat landings still operate at the lake edge in barangays like Tunasan and Cupang, even as the inland districts have filled with high-rise residential and office construction. The lake feeds the Pasig River system and ultimately Manila Bay. The light over the water at dusk is one of the things old Muntinlupa residents will tell a visitor to come and see.
Most visitors come for Alabang, the central business district anchored by Filinvest City, a master-planned commercial area built up since the 1990s. Festival Mall, the Alabang Town Center, and the headquarters of several large Philippine companies sit within a few minutes' drive of one another. The heritage church of San Jeronimo, dating to the Spanish colonial period, stands in the poblacion. South Luzon Expressway connects the city north to central Manila and south toward Calamba, Tagaytay, and the Batangas coast.