The author, critic and academician, Dennis B. Gonzaga, wrote a series of 28 short features on various creative, cultural, and heritage elements around the city of Naga. These were featured on The 416 Art Space FB page and the Rigmat Arts and Culture Fest FB pages — about an unsung food court near San Francisco Church, “Cha Kamot” of the kinalas fame, unheralded heroes of the 1898 revolution, the city’s monument to the 1986 People Power Movement, the nation’s second oldest school-based museum, Mount Isarog as a biodiversity hotspot, the foremost maestro of Bikol art, and many more about this vibrant, colorful and happy place. This is the final Part 4 of a series of 4, featuring Days 22 to 28.

February 22: “Face The Wall”

Naga City is well-known for its homegrown restaurants. There is Bigg’s Diner and Graceland that appeal to the more mainstream tourist crowd. And then there is New China and Naga Garden that remain favorites among locals. Aside from these, there are concept restaurants, hole-in-the-wall carinderias, coffee kiosks, garage diners, and street food carts popping all over. There is a plate for every palate and pocket.

But for cheap eats that offer both flavor and fullness, the headliner is an alley that locals refer to as “Face The Wall”. The name comes from the arrangement of the common dining area where tables and chairs are arranged so that diners eat facing the firewall of the adjacent building. The name and the place have become fixtures in the City’s pop culture.

Situated just near the San Francisco Church, it is a row of food stalls that serve home-cooked style meals all throughout the day, and sometimes even late at night. From breakfast staples such as “silog” meals and pansit to lunch and dinner favorites like adobo, sinigang, and the big four stews (menudo, mechado, afritada, and kaldereta), there are lots of choices. This is also the spot to get the better versions of local favorites such as laing and kinunot. In Bikol, the gauge in determining if a carinderia is worth it is if it cooks its coconut milk-based viands well.

Even with the rising cost of supplies and services, the food items are reasonably priced per serving. For years, “Face The Wall” has been Naga City’s unsung gastronomic center.

Pro tip : Don’t forget to ask for the free mystery soup and extra “sarsa” on your rice.

Scenes at “Face the Wall” (credit: Rigmat Arts and Culture):

February 23: Cha Kamot

Only a few might know Fe Solis Cordova, but any true-blue Nagueño knows her nickname, Cha Kamot. The name Cha Kamot is a shared core memory among Nagueños.

While kinalas may not be her original creation, as it has been referenced in Marco de Lisboa’s 16th century lexicon, she certainly was instrumental in putting it on the map. From her originally small and makeshift stall along Corregidor St., Bgy. Dayangdang, she has fed almost two generations of Nagueños eager for a bowl of hearty beef soup to start or end the day, to satisfy a craving, to celebrate a personal win, or to recover from a bout of misfortune.

Through the years, she has changed little in her short menu or in her restaurant’s spartan setup. Despite the emergence of other competing kinalas diners and gentrified variations, Cha Kamot remains at the center of this gastronomic subculture. Her name has a more endearing recall than other homegrown celebrities, politicians, and other influential personalities. Indeed, these celebrities, politicians, and influential personalities frequent her space not only for her dish but to also share in her quaint but potent aura of popularity.

Cha Kamot is a name and a brand that endures because it is spread by word and kept to heart. She is truly one of the pillars of Naga City’s cultural identity.

Naga City will miss her.

+ Fe Solis Cordova (16 August 1946 – 15 February 2025)

February 24: Elias Angeles and Felix Plazo

Poets and patriots lend their names to streets and songs. While songs can be effective repositories of history and memory, streets become forgotten gravestones buried under succeeding sediments of dust, mud, tire tracks, and footfalls. Street signs are headstones.

The streets of Elias Angeles and Felix Plazo are among the busiest arteries in the city. Elias Angeles cuts across a chunk of the downtown business district and connects culturally-significant areas such as the two city plazas and the Metropolitan Cathedral. Felix Plazo is a backroad that serves as an alternative to motorists who wish to enter the city proper from Milaor while avoiding the traffic logjam in Mabolo and Triangulo areas during peak hours.

Elias Angeles of Pasig and Felix Plazo of Tigaon are largely forgotten even among Nagueños. They were Guardia Civil corporals who led a revolt on September 18, 1898 that decisively ended centuries of Spanish colonial rule over Nueva Caceres. What made their uprising noteworthy is that it was initiated and completed outside the ambit of Aguinaldo’s encompassing revolution. Angeles and Plazo established a Bikol republic at least until the Philippine-American war exploded.

Their importance in shaping the revolutionary narrative in Naga City remains largely unheralded. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the commemorative date of their successful bid for independence from Spanish rule ironically falls on the same week as the Peñafrancia festivities.

They have no prominent statues or dolmens. Even the road signages that carry their name are in disrepair. But they are important figureheads even as we laud our identity as a City where informed opposition and vigilance are safeguarded and acknowledged.

February 25: Freedom Monument

In a country where social memory is short and fleeting, monuments are consolations instead of commemorations. We build monuments so that we may remember. The sad reality is that we leave it to stone, steel, and concrete to remember so that we can conveniently forget and move on. But wihtout the lessons of history to guide us, we are unable to chart a right path and fall into the same pitfalls of our broken past.

The Freedom Monument dedicated to the EDSA People Power Movement that now stands along the crossing between the streets of P. Burgos and Gen. Luna is a memory marker of an injurious past from which we have yet to fully heal. The fact that it stands at the center of key streets that have a university, a church, a police station, and a business district on its ends is rather symbolic of how the EDSA movement of 1986 impacted various aspects of our civic consciousness.

But the manner with which we manage our collective memory of EDSA is reflected in how we value the monument. Like the Naga River that becomes central to our consciousness only for about two weeks every September, the Freedom Monument is almost passively commemorated with a token wreath and a speech or two every 25th of February. It becomes a dust coated, unlit roadblock for the rest of the year.

The sad irony of revolutions, peaceful or not, is that when we fail to keep watch, the same wolves that we drove away will return. The Freedom Monument, as with the other tangible markers of history and memory, are the fence posts that anchor our collective resolve to never forget.

February 26: University of Nueva Caceres Museum

The University of Nueva Caceres Museum is the second oldest school-based museum after the University of Sto. Tomas Museum. It was established on October 1, 1952 as a repository for historical items relevant to the Arts and Sciences. Throughout the years, it has served as a home for artifacts that are considered important in the fields of cultural studies, history, ethnography, and natural sciences.

Included in its key collections are ancient domestic and hunting tools, fishing and foraging implements, body accessories and ornaments, talismans and objects associated with indigenous religious rituals and practices, and burial items.

The museum has three main galleries.

The Archeological Gallery has a collection of Chinese porcelains, indigenous earthenware vessels, and items that were part of the ancient barter trades. It also includes legal inscriptions in the traditional writing systems that were already in place prior to the advent of the Spanish colonial enterprise.

The Spanish Gallery contains religious items and documents that provide a glimpse of life in the colonial period, The preserved documents include folklore, songs, and similar literature that were the product of the rich interaction between Spanish culture and indigenous worldviews. All of these are accessible through the small library in the museum.

The American-Japanese gallery features articles of war, including military correspondence, flags, war records and reports, weaponry, and other items that bring to memory the horrors of the Second World War.

The University of Nueva Caceres Museum was recently and officially declared a historical museum. In this role, it is emerging to be a very important institution not only for enthusiasts and advocates of history and culture, but also for researchers and scholars who are committed to completing and reclaiming the narrative of our fragmented past.

Click this link to learn more about the UNC Museum.

Featured Exhibits at the UNC Museum (credit: Kyna’s Whereabouts):

February 27: Mount Isarog

Isarog is the prominent summit that borders six towns and one city: Calabanga, Tinambac, Goa, Tigaon, Ocampo, Pili, and Naga City. It rises to 2000 meters above mean sea level and is categorized as an active stratovolcano. While it is not perceived as being as majestic as Mayon Volcano, Isarog stands out as a biodiversity hotspot. It is the region’s ecological heartland. It features four major types of vegetation: lowland forest, grassland, montane forest, and mossy forest.

It is estimated to be a natural habitat for more than 1300 varieties of flora, including the Rafflesia which is the largest flower in the world. It is also home to the endemic fauna, including three species of shrew-rats. Every year, new species of plants and animals are being discovered in its lush forest covers.

Isarog’s water ecosystems are also impressive. It features hot springs and waterfalls and interlacing streams. Its watershed systems also supply potable water to 15 towns and the City of Naga, and irrigation water to around 70,000 hectares of agricultural land. Seven natural sub-catchments drain into 18 major rivers and waterways that cross across the province. Much of the regions fertility is due to Mt. Isarog.

The ecological health of Isarog is important to the City of Naga as well as to its adjacent municipalities. We depend on its natural bounties, from the water it supplies, to the quality of the air we breathe, to our resilience against the battery of typhoons. But with the relentless march of progress picking up pace and moving uplands as most of the lowlands have already been subjected to urbanization, Isarog is constantly at risk. With trees in the lowlands being cut in order to accommodate road expansions and other infrastructures, we need Isarog to endure. This acknowledgment of the importance of the mountain to our very existence has become a core advocacy among local creatives and cultural workers.

Views of Mt. Isarog (credit: Kaddlagan Outdoor Adventure Tours):

February 28: The Art of Maestro Raul Alcomendas

With time and tecnhnique in context, there is perhaps no other homegrown artist that has studiously studied the color palette of the heritage and milieu of Naga City and Bikol than Raul Alcomendas.

His signature style is enduring even if it has since evolved from the epic mural-esque montages reminiscent of Carlos “Botong” Francisco and the arresting and engaging slices of public life in the manner of Norman Rockwell, to more restrained, intimate, and minimalist pieces evoking the works of Mauro Malang Santos. And while the elan of these three artists are evident in the works of Alcomendas then and now, what stands out are the distinct tones and complements of terracotta, amber, and rosette that define his canvas.

There is a warmth unique to the works of Alcomendas. It is a warmth that mirrors that of the intense tropical light that blankets the Region. It is a warmth that channels the quiet spiritual zeal of its people. It is both the quality of light and the culture of the people that Alcomendas consistently celebrates in his works. From his large pieces that are mostly inspired by the grand mythologies of Bikol and by its historical narratives, to his smaller works centering on vignettes of parochial life, he ensures that there is no space wasted, and there is no visual element out of purpose. His works are full without being gratuitous. Each piece is a visual feast and an emotional conversation.

Alcomendas is also distinct in crafting a particular look in his representations of people in his works. His skin tone aesthetics is appropriate to his spectrum of ambers and rosettes, and earthy colors. He does not shy away from showcasing and celebrating the human body, their skin kissed with the intensity of the tropical sun.

His visual style is a fusion of Romantic and Folk elements. Emotionalism and drama are the dominant attributes, particularly in his large scale montage pieces. He is a storyteller, and he guides the eye from one end of the canvas to the other, as if a stage director guiding the audience through the various acts of a theater piece. But he balances the tendency for excess that tends to afflict romanticist aesthetics with folk-inspired visual elements. There is a flatness in his composition. But this flatness is what enables the eye to rest in between dominant elements in the composition. He reserves the strongest tones where he wants the audience to focus, leaving the rest purposely rendered in decorative glazes and subtle outlines.

The legacy of Raul Alcomendas in the visual arts communities of Naga City and Bikolandia is an enduring one. His works are found in nearly all big hotels, churches, government offices, restaurants, hospitals and clinics, and business boardrooms, and private collections. His art is always sought after by authors and editors to be included as cover and interior art in books of various genres.

His style is one of the most emulated among his contemporaries, his juniors, and younger artists who only know him by reputation and not by name. Despite his recent extended hiatus, he remains at the center of conversation and inspiration in Naga City’s visual arts landscape.

Featured art by Raul Alcomendas:

The header is an image captured from the print by Jose Honorato Lozano, known for popularizing the Letras y Figuras style during the Spanish colonial period. It depicts the arrival of Gov. General Narciso Claveria y Zaldua at Nueva Caceres, February 16, 1845. The painting is currently featured in the University of Nueva Caceres Museum.

About the author:

DENNIS B. GONZAGA: Writer, critic, and academician. Former Humanities faculty at Ateneo de Naga University. Curator of The 416 Art Space in Naga City. Advocate for local culture. AB Political Science graduate, Ateneo de Naga University; MA Asian Studies graduate , University of the Philippines.