Miguel Lopez de Legazpi founded the city of Manila in 1571, 50 years after the Spanish discovery of the Philippines. Manila, being better positioned than Cebu for trade with China, was made the original capital of the Philippines.

Intramuros – Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Here the colonizers built Intramuros, an impregnable European style thick stone-walled city which was the seat of Spanish rule located south of the Pasig River. Although Intramuros was laid out as a pentagon, its uneven sides more approximate a triangle. The twenty-foot-high walls stretched for nearly 4.5 km (3 miles). In some places, they reached twenty-five feet in height and had a thickness of up to forty feet at the bottom. Inside, following Legaspi’s blueprint for the capital, succeeding Spanish governors built churches, chapels, convents, palaces for the governor-general and the archbishop, schools, university (in as early as 1611), printing press, hospitals and soldiers’ barracks, and grand…