Olongapo
— — the harbour the navy left behind.
Not only on a wall.
“Olongapo sits on the eastern shore of Subic Bay, on the western coast of Luzon. For nearly a century the city grew around the American naval station; the base closed in 1992 and the city kept the harbour. The Subic Bay Freeport spread into the old shipyards, and the rainforest came back over the rest. Magsaysay Drive still runs the length of town, lined now with karaoke bars and noodle houses.
Olongapo, 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.
Olongapo is a highly urbanised city in Zambales province on the western coast of Luzon, about 130 kilometres northwest of Manila. The city wraps the eastern shore of Subic Bay and the lower slopes of the Zambales Mountains, with a population near 260,000 at the 2020 census. From 1885 to 1992 it grew around what became the largest American naval installation in Southeast Asia. The bay itself is administered separately as the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, a duty-free economic district covering more than 67,000 hectares of former base land, port, and protected forest.
The city's defining year is 1992. The Philippine Senate refused to renew the bases treaty and the U.S. Navy withdrew from Subic that November, ending almost a century of American presence. Mount Pinatubo had erupted the year before, blanketing the base in volcanic ash. The mayor at the time, Richard Gordon, organised volunteer crews to sweep and salvage the facilities and pitched the bay to international shipping. The Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority was created in March 1992 and the Freeport opened in November. The transition is still studied as one of the rare orderly handovers of a major overseas base.
Olongapo is reached from Manila in about two and a half hours by bus along the SCTEX expressway. The Freeport's beaches at Camayan and Triboa are the most-visited stretch, with calm water inside the bay and tropical rainforest behind. The Subic Bay Ecological Park protects roughly 10,000 hectares of secondary forest, the old base's accidental conservation legacy and home to a small population of fruit bats. The city itself is hot and humid through the year, with a dry season from December through May; July through October bring the heaviest rain and the occasional typhoon.