Gridcrosser: Coconut Creativity: Spectacles and Festivity at Quezon’s Niyogyugan Festival

The provincial capitol grounds in Lucena City were transformed into a virtual theme park with colorful agri-tourism booths

Groups of dancers paraded and performed on the streets of Lucena City for the annual Niyogyugan Festival of the province of Quezon. While it was rainy in several parts of the country, the capital of the province was sunny, the heat bearing down on the dancers. With colorful costumes, they enlivened the sleepy afternoon but did not match the verve and agility of dancers in the festivals in the Visayas such as in the Sinulog Festival of Cebu and the Dinagyang Festival of Iloilo City. What attracted more attention during the parade were the floats, inventive and sometimes intricate, given the restrictions in the materials to be used.

It is noticeable that the penchant of the Tagalog people and region is in ornamentation. During fiestas, Bulacan traditionally puts up singkaban, arches made purely of bamboo, amazing with its curlicues and other details. Baler and San Luis in Aurora also set up decorative arches that instantly foment a festive air. In Quezon, the town of Gumaca is known for its aranya and baluarte, while Lucban is a star during its fiesta with houses abundantly decorated with kiping and farm produce.

In the Niyogyugan Festival, the biggest attractions were the fair booths around the provincial capitol grounds and the floats. While the festival is of recent invention, with only five years of mounting, they make their booths and floats as if they have been doing them for ages, showing a native knack for crafts and embellishment.

The booths actually figured prominently during the birth of the festival. Niyogyugan Festival started as a trade fair to bolster the coconut industry with the aim of reclaiming the status being the number-one producer of coconuts in the country. The province of Quezon rivals three Davao provinces as the country’s top coconut producer with a total coconut plantation of 391,196 hectares, representing 78 percent of its agricultural land, with about 78 million coconut trees. Each of the 203,000 farmers in the province tills an average of nearly two hectares of coconut plantation.

Later on, taking cue from the idea of congresswoman Aleta Suarez, the trade fair was transformed into a contemporary festival in 2012. The name was a portmanteau of the Filipino words niyog (coconut) and yugyugan (dance). The festival was timed to coincide with the commemoration of the birth anniversary of Manuel Luis Quezon, president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 to 1944, who was born on August 19, 1878, after which the province was named.

Like any other festivals in the country, Niyogyugan is a weeks-long agricultural, tourism and cultural event filled with concerts, a beauty contest, sports, socials, and others, culminating with a parade, street dancing and dance showdown. This year, it has held from August 17 to 27. The coconut remains the center of the celebration with the booths featuring diverse displays of coconut products, as well as other farm produce and marine catches from the province’s upland towns and coastal and island communities.

The booths themselves were predominantly constructed using coconuts, from trunks and leaves to the husks and fibers, and were designed to represent the culture of the different towns. The capitol grounds would be transformed into a theme park and an outdoor market offering virgin coconut oil, lambanog, skimmed milk, coconut water drink, coconut vinegar, coconut sugar, cheese, yogurt cream, sauces, cooked dishes and others. Aside from food products, there were also furniture, handicrafts, house décor, fiber and netting used in landscaping, all from coconuts. Booths of the coastal and island towns, some of which took about ten hours of travel to reach Lucena to participate, sold exotic clams and conches and other marine produce. At night they were all lit up to the delight of visitors who came in droves. The past years, about 200,000 visitors came to the festival. This year, visitors reached about half a million, indicating its growing popularity. Exhibitors reportedly earned around P15 million in sales of their products.

From thirty-eight in 2015 and thirty-nine in 2016, this year all of the Quezon’s thirty-nine towns and two cities were able to put up their own booths. Aside from products, the booths were also educational, each featuring a mini-exhibit of their tourist attractions, local culture and unique features.

Gumaca was replica of the San Diego Fortress or Kutang Kastilyo, a well-known historical landmark of the town, embellished with a baluarte or decorative arch; while Pagbilao was in the shape of the view deck in the Pagbilao Mangrove Experimental Forest in Ibabang Palsabangon to highlight this new eco-tourism destination.

Known for its ancestral houses, the Sariaya booth was inspired by an art-deco mansion complete with a little rondalla band, which played live music in the late afternoon.

The Tayabas booth was crowned with a giant bottle of lambanog, the iconic alcoholic drink of southern Tagalog region, indispensable in social gatherings. Beside it was the Atimonan booth on which its popular folkloric creature, the mermaid, sat. The town is known to have a mermaid statue on Lamon Bay.

Padre Burgos booth was impressive with giant chickens reminding visitors of its original name, Laguimanok, so named because its coastline is said to be shaped like a chicken’s bill. Giant birds also adorned the Lopez booth, made with multi-colored buri fans or pamaypay, the known product of the town.

The Infanta booth was dome-shaped to represent the coconut, made up of myriad, polished coconut shells, while the Panukulan booth was shaped like sea waves, being a town in the island of Polillo in the Philippine Sea.

The floats echoed the booth’s motif. There were twenty-two this year, paraded together with dancers, on the August 27, the culmination day.

Lucban fielded a float shaped like a giant carabao to emphasize its being an agricultural town, while Calauag’s float featured a humongous sea turtle, covered with tiles of coconut shells. The Padre Burgos float had a giant chicken while the Quezon float had a big red lionfish. A giant mask fronted the Tagkawayan float, giving tribute to its early settlers, the Aeta, while Sariaya highlighted its local bread, the sweet and fragrant pinagong. The Candelaria float remained simple, decorated with giant candles, but it proved to be the most polished and elegant float.

The Niyogyugan Festival proved to be a fitting tribute to the coconut, widely considered as the “tree of life” for its important role in the province and the lives of its people. The festival has shown its innumerable uses, including as material to showcase how creative Quezonians can get.