San Pablo
— — the city the seven lakes hold up.
Not only on a wall.
“A coconut city in Laguna, ringed by seven small crater lakes left by old volcanic explosions. Sampaloc, the largest, sits a short walk from the cathedral and the wet market. Mount Banahaw rises to the south, often half in cloud. Tricycles, sari-sari stores, the smell of buko pie from the highway stalls. People come from Manila on weekends for the lakes and the cool air; the city itself goes about its week regardless. A place that holds its scale and does not perform.
San Pablo, 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.
San Pablo is a component city in the province of Laguna, about 80 kilometres south-southeast of Manila, with a population of roughly 285,000 recorded in the 2020 census. The city sits at the southern edge of the Laguna lowlands where they meet the slopes of Mount Banahaw, a 2,170-metre stratovolcano shared with Quezon Province. The downtown is built around the San Pablo Cathedral and the public market, with the seven crater lakes scattered through the surrounding barangays. It is the largest city in Laguna by land area.
The seven lakes of San Pablo — Sampaloc, Bunot, Pandin, Yambo, Calibato, Mohicap, and Palakpakin — are maar lakes, formed by phreatic eruptions where rising magma met groundwater and blew out shallow circular craters. Sampaloc, the largest, covers about 104 hectares and sits in a near-perfect bowl ringed by a public walking loop. Pandin and Yambo, paired and reached by a short bangka ride, are the cleanest and the most photographed; the others fall along the city's older fishponds. Tilapia aquaculture has been managed under BFAR carrying-capacity limits since the early 2000s.
San Pablo is a straightforward day trip from Manila on the SLEX and the Pan-Philippine Highway, or by PNR commuter rail to Lucena via Calamba. Most visitors start at Sampaloc, then take a tricycle east to Pandin for a raft lunch on the lake. The wet market opens early; the cathedral, finished in 1839 and rebuilt after the 1880 earthquake, anchors the centre. Buko pie stalls along the Maharlika Highway in nearby Los Baños and Calauan are a standard last stop on the drive back north.