Maynila fell; Legazpi’s city still rules the bay
Manila, capital of the Philippines and second-most populous city after Quezon City, held 1,902,590 people in the 2024 census on Manila Bay’s eastern Luzon shore. Tagalog Maynila stood fortified by 1258; after Rajah Sulayman’s defeat at Bangkusay, Miguel López de Legazpi began the Spanish city on 24 June 1571.
Under American rule it became the country's first chartered city through Philippine Commission Act No. 183 on 31 July 1901, and Republic Act No. 409, a revised city charter, granted it autonomy on 18 June 1949. The Pasig River cuts it into northern and southern halves, and it has 16 administrative districts and six congressional ones.
Its name comes from Maynilà, usually read as the place where indigo plants abound, from Sanskrit nīla, or where the mangrove shrub nilad grows. The nilad reading first appears in John Ray's Historia Plantarum of 1704, drawing on the Jesuit botanist Georg Josef Kamel, and survives in names like Maynilad Water Services. The Angono Petroglyphs nearby, dated to about 3000 BC, are the oldest trace of people in the area.
Maynila and neighbouring Tondo traded with China under the Song and Yuan dynasties and flourished in the Ming period. Chinese annals record that twelfth-century Brunei, then Hindu, attacked a place called Malilu that some scholars identify with Manila. Legazpi declared the city part of New Spain and set up a council in today's Intramuros, exploiting a rivalry between Hindu Tondo and Muslim Manila. Spain then made it capital of the Spanish East Indies, which it held for three centuries, and 400 Tlaxcalan soldiers from Mexico helped garrison it.
For more than two centuries the Manila–Acapulco galleons linked the city across the Pacific, trading Mexican and Peruvian silver for Chinese silk, Indian gems and spices. In 1582 the islands' first Catholic synod, held in Manila, argued that Filipinos already held natural dignity and sovereignty. After Spain conquered Ternate in 1606, its sultan, Said Din Burkat, was deported to Manila with his family and retinue.
Source: Manila
