Manila: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Miguel López de Legazpi founded Manila in 1571 on the site of a Muslim settlement at the mouth of the Pasig, and the Spanish built a walled city of sixty-four hectares — the cathedral, the governor’s palace, seven churches, a university and the houses of the ruling class, all inside three kilometres of stone. Intramuros was Manila; everything beyond the gates was extramuros and did not count. In February and March 1945 the American recapture of the city and the Japanese defence of it destroyed almost all of it in a month: around a hundred thousand civilians were killed, and Manila ended the war as the second most ruined Allied city after Warsaw. Of Intramuros, exactly one building was left standing. Two and a half hours, and almost everything you will look at is a reconstruction — which is the point of the walk.

A short history of Manila

Before the Spanish, Manila was ruled by Muslim rajahs. In 1571 Miguel López de Legazpi founded the Spanish city here and built Intramuros, the walled city. From then until 1815 the galleons sailed from here to Acapulco in Mexico, carrying silk and spices from China. In 1898 the Philippines passed to the United States. In the late 1930s President Manuel Quezon took in about 1,300 Jewish refugees from Europe in the Philippines. In February 1945, in the battle to liberate the city from the Japanese, about a hundred thousand civilians were killed and most of the old city was destroyed.

The ten best sights in Manila

1
Intramuros
The Spanish walled city of 1571 — it was Manila, and everything else was outside the walls
2
San Agustin Church
1607, and the only Intramuros building left standing in 1945. The church is free; the museum is 200 pesos. Verified 10/2026
3
Manila Cathedral
The building you see is the eighth on this spot; the seven before it burned, fell or were bombed
4
Fort Santiago
Rizal’s last cell, and brass footprints mark his walk to the execution. 75 pesos, verified 10/2026
5
Rizal Shrine
Inside the fort: his last letters, the lamp he hid his final poem in, and his own vertebra
6
Casa Manila
A reconstruction of an 1850s merchant’s house — no original survived the war. 75 pesos, verified 10/2026
7
Museo de Intramuros
Church art salvaged from the churches that were destroyed; housed in a rebuilt hospital
8
Bahay Tsinoy
The museum of the Chinese in Philippine life, and it is the best-told small museum in the city
9
Baluarte de San Diego
A circular Spanish bastion of 1587 with a garden inside the ruins; the quietest corner of Intramuros
10
Puerta Real
The royal gate, opened only for the governor-general and the archbishop; now a lawn and a drawbridge

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Intramuros: the city that was destroyed

San Agustin Church · Completed in 1607 and the oldest stone church in the Philippines — and the only building inside the walls of Intramuros still standing when the fighting stopped in March 1945. It has come through at least seven destructive earthquakes, including the 1863 one that flattened the cathedral next door, because the Augustinians built it with an oval vault and massive buttresses. The carved wooden doors are original, the trompe-l’œil ceiling is 1875 Italian work, and Legazpi himself is buried in the floor near the altar.
Manila Cathedral · The building you walk into was consecrated in 1958 and it is the eighth cathedral on this exact spot. The first, of bamboo and nipa palm, burned in 1583. The others went in a typhoon, in the earthquakes of 1600, 1645, 1863 and 1880, and finally in the battle of 1945, which left only the foundations and part of a wall. The bronze doors are modern and tell that whole sequence in relief, which is an unusually honest thing for a cathedral to put on its own front door.
Fort Santiago · The Spanish citadel at the river mouth, and the place the Philippine national story turns on: José Rizal, a doctor and novelist whose two books had made Spanish rule untenable, was held in a cell here and shot at dawn on 30 December 1896 at the age of thirty-five. He wrote his last poem the night before and hid it rolled inside an alcohol lamp, which his sister collected. Brass footprints set into the ground trace his walk from the cell to the execution ground. Under the Japanese the fort’s dungeons flooded at high tide, and around six hundred prisoners died in them.
Casa Manila · A complete 1850s merchant house — except that it was built in the 1980s, on the orders of Imelda Marcos, because not one original Intramuros house survived the war. It is a careful reconstruction from photographs and from houses elsewhere in the islands, and it is the only way left to see how the Spanish-Filipino elite actually lived: capiz-shell sliding windows, a ventilated upper floor, and a privy with two seats side by side so that conversation did not have to stop.
Baluarte de San Diego · A circular artillery bastion begun in 1587 and the oldest stone fortification in the walls — circular because the engineer, a Jesuit, was still working from Italian Renaissance theory rather than the angular bastions that had already replaced it in Europe. It was obsolete within a generation and partly rebuilt as a wedge. It is now a garden inside the ruin, and it is the one place in Intramuros where you will be alone.
Bahay Tsinoy · A small, extremely well-made museum of the Chinese in Philippine life, and the history it tells is not comfortable: the Spanish needed Chinese traders and craftsmen and simultaneously feared them, confined them to a ghetto within cannon range of the walls called the Parián, and massacred them on several occasions — around twenty thousand in 1603 alone. The Chinese built most of what Intramuros looked like while being forbidden to live in it.

Rizal Park and the American city

Spain lost the Philippines to the United States in 1898 and the Americans set about rebuilding Manila as a showpiece of their own: they hired Daniel Burnham, who had just laid out the Chicago lakefront, to draw a plan in 1905, and his pupil William Parsons and later the Filipino architect Juan Arellano built it — a civic centre of neoclassical government buildings around a vast open park on the bay, with a boulevard along the water. Most of it burned in 1945 and was rebuilt, and three of those buildings now hold the national museums, all of which are free. Two hours, flat, and most of it is in the open: go after four, and be aware that the museums shut at five.

The Rizal Monument · Rizal was shot on this ground, then called Bagumbayan, on 30 December 1896, and the monument that holds his remains was unveiled in 1913 after an international design competition — won not by a Filipino but by a Swiss sculptor, Richard Kissling, whose entry came second and was built because the winner withdrew. A military guard has stood here continuously since 1912. The bronze marker at its base is kilometre zero: every road distance in the Philippines is measured from this spot.
Rizal Park · Fifty-eight hectares of lawn, fountains and monuments, and the two founding moments of the republic both happened on it: Rizal’s execution in 1896 and the declaration of independence from the United States on 4 July 1946. It is also where the Marcos dictatorship held its rallies and where the crowds celebrated when he fled. On a Sunday it is full of families, and the open-air chess tables along the eastern side have been there for decades.
National Museum of Fine Arts · The old Legislative Building, and in the hall straight ahead of the entrance hangs the Spoliarium: four metres by seven, painted by Juan Luna in Rome in 1884, showing dead gladiators being dragged from a Roman arena. It won the gold medal at the Madrid exposition that year, and Rizal’s generation read it as being about the Philippines under Spain — which was the point. The canvas was damaged, rolled up for decades and restored, and the museum is free.
National Museum of Anthropology · The old Finance Building, and the object to find is the Manunggul jar: a burial jar from a cave in Palawan, made around 800 BC, with two figures sitting in a boat on the lid — one rowing, one with arms crossed — which is a nine-hundred-year-older depiction of the soul’s voyage after death than anything comparable in the region. It is on the thousand-peso note. The boat-coffin gallery next door is the same idea in full size.
Manila City Hall and the post office · The City Hall of 1941 is shaped, from the air, like a coffin — which is true, visible on any satellite map, and not intentional. The post office two hundred metres away was Juan Arellano’s 1926 masterpiece, a colonnaded hall that was gutted in 1945, rebuilt to the original drawings, and then gutted again by a huge fire on 21 May 2023 that took most of the interior and a great deal of the Philippine postal archive with it. Restoration is under way; check before you walk over expecting to go in.
Roxas Boulevard · Burnham’s bayside boulevard, built on reclaimed land and originally called Dewey Boulevard after the American admiral who sank the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in 1898. The sunset over the bay is the thing: the whole city comes out to the sea wall for it and it costs nothing. The water is not clean and the government periodically announces that it will be; the crushed-shell artificial beach poured here in 2020 was controversial for exactly that reason.

Binondo and Quiapo

Across the Pasig from Intramuros are the two districts the Spanish built for everybody who was not allowed inside the walls, and they are the most alive part of Manila. Binondo was established in 1594 as a settlement for Chinese who converted to Catholicism — which makes it, by most reckonings, the oldest Chinatown anywhere in the world — and it is still the food capital of the country. Quiapo, next to it, is where the Black Nazarene is, and the devotion around that one statue is on a scale nothing in Europe matches. Two and a half hours, go hungry, and keep your phone in your pocket rather than your hand: these are crowded streets and that is the only real precaution needed.

Jones Bridge · The crossing from the old city into Binondo, and it used to be the handsomest bridge in Southeast Asia: a 1920 neoclassical span with four allegorical statues and ornate lamps, often compared to the Pont Alexandre III in Paris. It was blown up in 1945, rebuilt as a plain concrete deck, and in 2019 the city put replica lamp posts and statuary back on it — the originals of two of the four statues had survived in a park and were returned.
Binondo Church · Founded in 1596 to serve the converted Chinese of Binondo, and the saint it is named for came out of this parish: Lorenzo Ruiz, a Chinese-Filipino altar boy and sacristan here, who fled a murder charge on a ship to Japan in 1636, was arrested in Nagasaki as a Christian, refused to renounce under torture, and was killed in 1637. He was canonised in 1987 and is the first Filipino saint. The octagonal bell tower is the original; the rest was rebuilt after 1945.
Ongpin Street · The spine of Binondo, named after Roman Ongpin, a Chinese-Filipino shopkeeper who was arrested by the Spanish for refusing to stop wearing the barong tagalog. The street is gold shops, drugstores selling Chinese medicine, and bakeries that have been making hopia — a flaky bean-paste pastry — in the same ovens for a century. The famous one has been in business since 1936 and still sells only four or five fillings.
Quinta Market · The wet market on the river bank beside Quiapo Church, rebuilt in 2017 after decades of decay — and the rebuilding is itself worth noticing, because the new building has a flood-resistant ground floor and the upper level opens onto the Pasig ferry stop, which is the city quietly admitting that the river is a street again. The cooked-food stalls upstairs are where to eat, and the fish is from Navotas that morning.
Quiapo Church · The Black Nazarene is a life-size dark wooden image of Christ carrying the cross, carved in Mexico and brought here by galleon in 1606; the colour is usually explained as scorching in a fire on the voyage. On 9 January every year it is carried through the streets on a carriage pulled by ropes, in a procession that regularly draws several million people and takes more than twenty hours to cover six kilometres. Devotees walk barefoot and try to touch the rope. Nothing in Catholic Europe operates at that scale.
The Quiapo stalls · Immediately outside the church, in the shadow of it, is a market in things the church does not approve of: herbal abortifacients sold openly by women who have sat there for thirty years, love potions, candles colour-coded by what you are asking for, and anting-anting — brass amulets with Latin inscriptions, a folk-Catholic magic that goes back to the revolutionary era, when fighters wore them believing they stopped bullets. The same customer often buys the candle and the amulet.

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Getting to Manila and getting around

Ninoy Aquino International Airport · Ten kilometres south but allow 90 minutes in traffic; the four terminals are far apart and not linked
Clark International Airport · Eighty kilometres north on a former US air base; the budget alternative, with a bus to Manila
LRT Carriedo Station · The station for Quiapo and Binondo; the elevated LRT-1 is the fastest way across the old city
MRT Ayala Station · The Makati stop on the MRT-3; at rush hour the queue to get on the platform is outside the building
Tutuban Station · The 1887 terminus of the first railway in the islands; the building survives inside a shopping mall
Manila North Harbor · Where the inter-island ferries leave; two days to Cebu, and this is how most Filipinos travel

Cheap eats in Manila

Filipino food is the one great cuisine of Southeast Asia that nobody abroad can describe, and the reason is that it is not spicy and it is not subtle — it is sour, salty, sweet and fatty, often all at once, and it comes from three hundred years of Spain, fifty of America and two thousand of Chinese trade laid over Malay cooking. The two words to learn are suka, vinegar, and toyo, soy: between them they make adobo, which is the national dish and is a preservation technique rather than a recipe. Eat in Binondo, eat at a carinderia — a cook-shop where you point at trays — and eat rice with everything, including breakfast. Two to four dollars a plate.

Adobo · The national dish, two dollars; every family makes it differently and every family is right
Sisig · Pork cheek and ear on a sizzling plate with calamansi and chilli; three dollars and the best beer food here
Sinigang · A sour tamarind soup with fish or pork and whatever vegetables the market had. Two dollars
Lechon · Whole spit-roast pig, sold by the kilo from roadside stalls; the skin is the thing
Hopia and the Binondo bakeries · A flaky bean-paste pastry, cents apiece; the famous bakery has been open since the thirties
Halo-halo · Shaved ice with a dozen things under it; a dollar and a half, and the name means mix-mix
Taho · Warm silken tofu with brown syrup and tapioca, sold from two buckets at seven in the morning
Isaw and street grill · Chicken or pig intestine on a skewer, cents each; the vinegar dip is not optional
Pancit and lumpia · Noodles and spring rolls, both straight from Hokkien and both now completely Filipino
Balut · A fertilised duck egg, incubated and boiled; sold after dark by men calling the word. A third of a dollar

Museums in Manila

The three national museums on Rizal Park are free, air conditioned, within four hundred metres of each other, and genuinely good — which together makes them the best value in any city in this guide. Between them they hold the painting the nation argues about, the burial jar on the thousand-peso note, and a glass tree of life five storeys high. Add the Ayala Museum in Makati for a clear chronological overview, and Bahay Tsinoy for the half of the story the others skip. Most close at five and several shut on Mondays.

National Museum of Fine Arts · Free; the Spoliarium is in the first hall and it is four by seven metres
National Museum of Anthropology · Free; the Manunggul jar, the boat coffins and the textile galleries. Two hours
National Museum of Natural History · Free, in the old tourism building, and the glass tree in the atrium is five storeys high
Ayala Museum · In Makati and not free; sixty hand-made dioramas of Philippine history and the gold gallery
Bahay Tsinoy · The Chinese in Philippine life, in Intramuros; small, honest and the best-told museum in the city
Museo de Intramuros · Church art salvaged from the churches that were destroyed in 1945; one hour
Metropolitan Museum of Manila · Moved to Bonifacio Global City in 2022; modern Philippine art, and check the address first

Holy places in Manila

The Philippines is about eighty per cent Catholic and it is the only predominantly Christian country in Asia besides Timor-Leste, which is the single most consequential fact Spain left behind. But the Catholicism here is not European: it absorbed pre-Spanish animism whole, and the result is amulets sold outside churches, processions of a scale and intensity Europe abandoned centuries ago, and flagellants at Easter. There is also a Muslim minority of several million, concentrated in the far south, and the oldest mosque in the country predates the Spanish arrival. Churches are open and free; dress is relaxed but not beachwear.

Quiapo Church and the Black Nazarene · The 9 January procession draws millions and runs over twenty hours; Fridays are busy all day
San Agustin Church · 1607, UNESCO listed, and the only Intramuros building left standing in 1945
San Sebastian Church · The only all-steel church in Asia, finished 1891 — and it is rusting from the inside
Manila Cathedral · The eighth building on the site, consecrated 1958; the bronze doors tell the other seven
Binondo Church · 1596; the parish of the first Filipino saint, who was martyred in Nagasaki
Las Piñas Bamboo Organ · 902 bamboo pipes, built 1816–24; there is a festival in February and recitals most of the year
Santa Ana Church · 1720s, and under the floor an excavated pre-Spanish burial ground you can look into

Nature and day trips near Manila

Metro Manila has almost no green left — it is thirteen million people on a flat delta between a bay and a lake, and the parks are the ones the Spanish and the Americans laid out. What it does have is an hour or two in any direction: a volcano inside a lake inside a volcano to the south, the second largest eruption of the twentieth century to the north, a fortress island at the mouth of the bay, and a ridge at Tagaytay that is twenty degrees cooler than the city. Typhoon season runs roughly June to November and Manila floods; check the forecast before committing to a day out.

Taal Volcano · Sixty-five kilometres south: a volcano in a lake in a volcano. It erupted in 2020 and access changes
Corregidor Island · Forty-nine kilometres out at the mouth of the bay; a ferry and a full day, and the tunnel is the point
Tagaytay · Fifty-five kilometres south on a crater ridge at 600 metres; the Taal viewpoint and the cool air
Mount Pinatubo · Eighty-five kilometres north; a 4x4 and a walk to a crater lake, and it is a long day
Pagsanjan Falls · Sixty-seven kilometres south-east; agree the price and the tip before you get in the canoe
Arroceros Forest Park · Two hectares and 61 tree species on the river, repeatedly saved from being built over

Things to do in Manila with kids

Manila is hard work with children for one reason above all others: the traffic. The city regularly places at or near the top of the world’s worst-congestion rankings and a six-kilometre journey can genuinely take an hour and a half, so the rule is to pick one district a day and stay in it. The compensation is that the three national museums are free and air conditioned, Filipinos are extraordinarily good with children, and nobody will mind a child making noise anywhere. Malls are not a cop-out here; they are where the entire city goes on a Sunday.

National Museum of Natural History · Free, air conditioned, and the six-metre crocodile and the glass tree hold a child for an hour
Manila Ocean Park · An aquarium with a walk-through tunnel behind the park; not cheap and reliably indoors
Museo Pambata · A hands-on children’s museum in a 1949 building on the bay; closed Mondays
Mall of Asia · An ice rink, a ferris wheel on the bay and a science centre; a Sunday disappears in it
Rizal Park · Grass, a relief map of the Philippines you can walk round, and the open-air chess tables
Corregidor Island · A ferry, a tram around the ruins and a tunnel; the best full day out for older children

Nightlife in Manila

Manila’s night splits by district and the distances between them are the problem, not the choice: Poblacion in Makati is the walkable bar quarter and the only one where you can move between places on foot; Bonifacio Global City is newer, cleaner and more expensive; Malate was the nightlife district for thirty years and is now mostly past it. Beer is San Miguel and it is cheap, rum is Tanduay, and the thing that will surprise a visitor is the live music — Filipino cover bands are a genuine national export and the standard in an ordinary bar is high.

Makati Poblacion · The walkable bar quarter; rooftops, speakeasies and street food in four blocks
Bonifacio Global City · The new-build district; wide pavements, craft beer and prices to match
Remedios Circle · The old Malate nightlife roundabout; faded, cheap and the live bands are still good
Roxas Boulevard sunset · The free event of the day; the sea wall fills by half past five and the beer vendors find you
Escolta at night · The Art Deco blocks have bars and a monthly night market in them now; check what is on
Greenbelt · Mall bars around a garden that stay open late; the safe, dull, reliable option

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Frequently asked questions about Manila

What is there to see in Manila?

The top sights in Manila are Intramuros, San Agustin Church and Manila Cathedral. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Manila?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Manila without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Manila?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Manila, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Intramuros: the city that was destroyed.

How do you get to Manila and get around?

The main ways are Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Clark International Airport and LRT Carriedo Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Manila, and for how much?

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