Colon Street is not the oldest street in the Philippines. 

Dr. Jose Eleazar Reynes Bersales, Cebu historian and archaeologist, pointed out that the belief on Colon Street being the oldest street in the Philippines is “probably by far the oldest fake news in the country today.”

Bersales, in a 2024 article he wrote for a real estate magazine which he posted on a social media account that shares memories of old Cebu, cited that the belief on Colon Street being the oldest in the Philippines has “tricked even the nation’s guardian of historical authenticity and accuracy, the National Historical Institute (now the National Historical Commission of the Philippines), which placed not one but two national historical markers on Colon Street, one in 1961, and another 38 years later in 1999.”

In his article entitled “Why Colon is not the oldest street in the Philippines,” Bersales said that there is no extant Spanish-era document or map, published or unpublished, that has come to light claiming that Colon Street was the first trail, road, or street that the Spanish built, contrary to the claim made in the 1961 NHI marker. 

“What is known is that sometime in 1910, a shop called American Bazar started peddling what may be considered the first postcard printed in Cebu (Mojares, n.d). It featured the Parian section of Calle Colon as it looked on its northwestern tail-end with the label “Oldest Street in Cebu,"” Bersales pointed out. 

“This was of an image shot by Dean Curran Tatom, an American soldier who had returned to Cebu that same year to revive a photo studio he established in 1901 which he folded some years later when he moved to Iloilo as the official photographer of the Philippine Railway Company (reference: The Cebu Chronicle, 1910),” Bersales added. 

“With so many US soldiers camped at Warwick Barracks (Cebu City) eager to send an image of Cebu back home, sales of this postcard soon increased, and the myth began to take hold,” Bersales elucidated. 

So if it is not Colon, where is the oldest street? 

“If there is a veritable candidate as the oldest street in the Philippines, therefore, it is without doubt Calle Magallanes,” Bersales said in the article. 

He posited “it is a wonder why even historians of the recent past never questioned how the oldest street in the Philippines can possibly be located about a kilometer inland in a city so famed in Rajah Humabon’s time for its vibrant trading post.”

Futher, Bersales mentioned that the conqueror Miguel Lopez de Legazpi established in 1565 a fort abutting that same waterfront and from there a “villa,” the beginnings of a Spanish “ciudad”?

"The earliest known map of Cebu City, dated to 1699, for example, shows the “ciudad” bordered on the west by the Estero de Parian, which is located between present-day Colon and Manalili Streets. Colon, thus, was clearly outside of the ciudad and its streets.”

“Following the Laws of the Indies, Legazpi and his successors were duty-bound to build streets in grid-like pattern surrounding a public square or plaza (which one does not find in Colon). On one side of this square would be a church and across it the “Cabildo” or “Casa Tribunal,” seat of civilian authority. Perhaps a market would be on another side, and across this the house of Spanish residents,” he further explained. 

Bersales said that the plaza is none other than Plaza Sugbu today.

“The same public square that Humabon had offered to (Ferdinand) Magellan when the latter asked where the historic first baptism (on April 14, 1521) would be held, the same spot marked today by the Magellan’s Kiosk, which was once traversed by Calle Magallanes.”

“If there is a veritable candidate as the oldest street in the Philippines, therefore, it is without doubt Calle Magallanes, so aptly named by the Spaniards for their fallen explorer, and not one named after another who never even set foot in the Philippines. Alarm bells should have rung in people’s minds when the claim to fame for Colon was first foisted. Commonsense logic would have dictated otherwise,” Bersales underscored. 

Colon is named after Cristobal Colon or Christopher Columbus, Italian explorer and navigator.