1730 Jesuit House

This guide to the 1730 Jesuit House in Cebu City's old Parian district follows Jaime Sy, who recognized his family's hardware warehouse in a decades-old library photograph of forgotten Jesuit buildings in the Philippines. It traces the coral-stone house back to its time as Jesuit headquarters before the order's expulsion from the Philippines in 1768, and through the ownership of the Alvarez family before it passed, generations later, to the Sys. A carved plaque inside still insists the house dates to 1730, which would make it the oldest dated house standing in the country.