IN his book, “Bikol Maharlika”, author Jose Calleja Reyes wrote that Naga was a flourishing riverine village when Spanish conquistador Juan de Salcedo came to conquer Bicol. Nearby were other flourishing barangays such as Milaor, Canaman and Quipayo. Along the river bank upstream from Naga were the villages of Minalabag (Minalabac), Bula and Bua (Nabua), Downstream were Libmanan, and Cabusao near San Miguel Bay.

These villages that bear their original Malayan names up to this day composed the few pre-Hispanic settlements where its people were described by Spanish chroniclers as “better ordered and governed than other parts (meaning the other villages in the Visayas and Manila which they first conquered)”.

Salcedo upon setting foot on Bicol soil established the first Spanish garrison settlement in the village of Libong (Albay). But on his way north, he found Naga by the river (situated in today’s Barangays Lerma and Dayandang) which had 3,000 houses compared to 800 and 300 in other Bicol villages. Awed by his new discovery, Salcedo’s garrison in Libong was thereupon moved to the opposite side of the Naga river on which he established Ciudad Caceres (today’s centro) in honor of Francisco de Sande, the governor general who hailed from the province of Caceres in Spain. Today’s Naga is the union of the native village and Ciudad Caceres that the Spaniards built. In fact, the old San Francisco Church, wanting to bring the natives into the fold of Christinaity, was built facing what is now Blumentritt Street on the opposite side of the river which by then was christened by the Spaniards as the San Felipe River.

Caceres in 1595 soon joined Cebu and Nueva Segovia (Cagayan) as the first three suffragan dioceses of the Episcopal See of Manila. Caceres became the center of evangelization in the Bicol peninsula, including Ticao and Masbate and the whole eastern part of Luzon.

In 1710, after 135 years of its foundation, the noble city saw the installation of “Nuestra Señora de Peñafrancia” through Miguel Robles de Cobarrubias, a Spanish priest who was an ardent devotee of the same Marian devotion as practiced in Peña de Francia, a mountainous area between the boundary of Salamanca and Caceres in Spain. “Was it simply coincidental that from the mountainous region of Caceres in Spain the miraculous Virgin of Peña de Francia would also find her home in the Eastern world in Bicol’s Ciudad Caceres?” Calleja asked.

By the 19th century, the place was called Nueva Caceres to distinguish it from its namesake in Spain. Soon were built a cathedral, the episcopal palace of stone, a seminary, and a stone building housing a college for women.

At the turn of the 19th century, Nueva Caceres was to play a part in the annals of the Philippine revolution with the martyrdom of 15 of its citizens (to whom was erected the Plaza Quince Martires), 11 of whom were executed on January 4, 1987, five days after Dr. Jose Rizal was executed in the same spot in Luneta.

In Nueva Caceres, too, came the reign of the first Filipino bishop after 333 years of Spanish rule, Msgr. Jorge Barlin of Baao, Camarines Sur. He played a major role in salvaging the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines from the schism wrought by the defiant Philippine Independent Church (Aglipayan). An Aglipayan convert, Father Vicente Ramirez, erstwhile parish priest of Lagonoy, Camarines Sur, refused to turn-over the parish church and convent to the Catholic Church with the final departure of the Spanish colonizers. Bishop Barlin fought and won the legal battle versus Ramirez over ownership of the Hispanic churches.

As the bishop of the See of Caceres, Barlin was accorded the distinct privilege of delivering the invocation at the historic inaugural session of the first Philippine Assembly in October 17, 1907. Nagueños immortalize him by naming the street leading to the Naga Cathedral in his honor.

When World War II came, the old city of Caceres was miserably ravaged. The Archbishop’s Palacio and the Colegio de Sta. Isabel were incinerated to the ground by bombs of the attacking American liberation forces. The burned hulks of their stone masonry were the only ones that remained. Although the Colegio was reconstructed, it never again recaptured its old Spanish flavor. The stonewalls of the Palacio were demolished and replaced by new archbishop’s residence “which by its diagonal erection almost signified the flourish of a crossing out of the grandeur of the original Palacio,” Calleja wrote.

The author expressed his feeling of loss: “Today, even the name of Ciudad Caceres or Nueva Caceres has fallen in use except to name a local university (Villa Caceres Hotel and Caceres Cable were to follow later – jbp). Naga, the name of the original native settlement persists and the old Ciudad Caceres has been poetically smothered in its native embrace.”

Footnote: The original Caceres is a province in Western Spain. It is bounded on the north by Salamanca and Avila, on the east by Toledo, on the north by Badajoz and on the west by Portugal. The capital bears the same name – Caceres. The old part of the city with its medieval palaces, turrets and massive walls is half Roman and half Arab. Caceres, of Roman origin, probably occupies the site of “Norba Caesarina”, an ancient Roman settlement in the Iberian Peninsula. Spain covers four-fifths (the remaining one-fifth comprises Portugal) of the Iberian Peninsula which was known to the Greeks as Iberia and to the Romans as Hispania.