Colon Obelisk arcae
Granite obelisk marking the disputed claim that this roadway is the country's oldest street.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Colon Obelisk in Cebu City traces a claim back to a 1910 postcard sold by an American shop, which called this road the oldest street in Cebu, and to a later printer who stretched it to the oldest street in the whole country. It follows the claim into a 1933 travel guidebook and onto the granite obelisk itself, which credits Miguel Lopez de Legazpi with laying the street out in 1565, and to the National Historical Commission markers bolted on in 1961 and again in 1999. A historian, Doctor Jobers Bersales, later went digging through old maps of the city to check the claim against the record.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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