Categories: Discover the PhilippinesManila

Paco Park – Once a Cemetery, Now a Recreational Garden

Planning a trip? Those who love to travel know the essence of all travel is about you and your enjoyment. Travelers know that the destination is a major part in planning a trip, experiencing and delving deeper into an unfamiliar places, people and culture is paramount.

Expand your horizons and set your sight to the Philippines, an off the beaten path travel site! An undiscovered paradise made of thousands of islands and white sand beaches all around! A tiny dot in the map of the world, and yet a haven for travelers, backpackers, retirees and even passersby.

It offers awesome tourist attractions, magnificent beaches, hot spring resorts, colorful festivals, hundreds of scenic spots and world-class hotels and facilities. Not to mention the tropical climate, the affordable prices as well as the friendly and hospitable, English-speaking people! You will be glad you came, and we’re sure, you WILL come back for more FUN in the Philippines!

PACO PARK

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Paco Park is a 4,114.80 square metre recreational garden area and was once Manila’s municipal cemetery during the Spanish colonial period. It is located along General Luna St. and at the east end of Padre Faura Street in Paco district in the City of Manila, the Philippines. – wikipedia.org

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In the heart of an industrial/warehouse zone in old Manila lies the reclusive Paco Park. Time has not been kind to its environs. Most locals would be hard put to find the park. All around are open-air cargo container depots, truck garages, medium-rise office buildings long past their prime, lower-middle-class housing and the odd horn or two.

Traffic on two of Manila’s busiest streets, Taft Ave. and United Nations Ave., crawls with blaring horns just two blocks away. But neither national events nor concerts are held here any longer.

There are too many other larger plazas and open spaces around the metropolis.

For all that, coming to Paco Park is like finding a large, well-maintained garden to call your own. Or a jewel in a quarry, if you will.

The partnership between government as owner and religious order as caretaker of chapel and churchyard works. You can stroll the narrow pathways around well-manicured lawns, or walk on the grass, if you want; most times, there is nobody to stop you.

Coming across the occasional grave or niche resting place brings to mind all those who had tramped this hallowed ground before you: the Spaniard “Guardia Civil”, the elite “ilustrado’s” burying one of their own, U.S. Scout Rangers from 1898 onward, the swaggering Japanese Kempetai in World War II and G.I.’s on R&R from the Korean and Vietnam wars.

In Spanish times, Paco Park was just a cemetery, safe enough to bury victims of the great cholera epidemic of 1820.

It is bounded by what are now General Luna and Padre Faura Streets in the Paco district of Manila.
Paco Park was the municipal cemetery of the district of Dilao, the former name of Paco, Manila. Aristocratic Spanish families who lived within Intramuros and old Manila were interred here. A Catholic chapel dedicated to St. Pancratius still stands and yet, its biggest claim to fame is that National Hero Dr. Jose Rizal was interred here after his 1896 execution by musketry for the crime of sedition. All he had done was write two allegorical novels about oppression by the Spanish and the right of Filipinos for a role in governance of the islands. – philippines-travel-guide.com

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