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What is the first city in the Philippines?
admiralsubic
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What is the first city in the Philippines?
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it depends on the definitions you are using. First City can refer to city by founding date, it can be distinguished by what is and isn’t legally or sociologically a city, or in economic terms. I will go through them in reverse order with some definitions of distinction. In economic terms, which defines First City as the most economically important city in a country. Though not always the country’s capital city, Manila certainly meets the definition of being the Philippines most economically important city. Other modern First Cities include New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto (let the oh so polite Canadian arguments begin). Manila and local politicians wrote the modern definitions for their country about what constitutes a city and pretty much named their city as the first Legal City. In sociological terms of what constitutes a city several of suburbs that make up Metro Manila are in fact much older cities, as are several other places in Philippines. In terms of raw founding dates, a great many modern cities were founded before Manila. Butuan City as the Capital of the Rajahnate of Butuan was founded in the 8th century and was a walled city by around 1000. Cebu was much the same by the 13th Century. Manila as we now know it wasn’t founded until 1571, and took nearly 150 years to become what Butuan had been in terms of city structure even if Butuan had suffered quite a bit of destruction by 1700.
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That would depend on your definition of “city.” There were population centers in the pre-Hispanic period, of which the largest and most important was probably Maynila, on the site of present-day Manila. Was it a “city”? Depends on what you mean by that term. From a Spanish/colonial perspective, they were established in Cebu (today’s Cebu City) for several years before they conquered Maynila. Thus to them Cebu was probably the first. At some point each of these centers got official confirmation from Spain, naming them as a “Ciudad,” but I don’t recall which was first.