Calamay Making

Overview

The Calamay Making Experience is a hands-on cultural activity offered in Barangay Ponong, Alburquerque, as part of an organised cultural and culinary tour of Bohol. Participants learn the traditional process of producing calamay — a dense, sweet confection made from ground glutinous rice, coconut milk, and brown sugar. The activity covers the full preparation sequence from raw ingredients through the slow-cooked paste to the finished product.

Calamay is one of Bohol’s best-known food exports and its production is a craft passed down through generations of households, particularly in Alburquerque and Jagna. Alburquerque is also notable for Asin Tibuok, the rare traditional ash-salt produced in the same municipality, giving the town a distinctive place in Bohol’s food heritage.

Location

Barangay Ponong, Alburquerque, Bohol. Alburquerque is a small municipality southwest of Tagbilaran, approximately 15 to 20 kilometres from the provincial capital.

Getting There

From Tagbilaran, take a jeepney or van bound for Alburquerque. Habal-habal (motorcycle taxi) can cover the final approach to Barangay Ponong. The activity is typically included in organised countryside tours; independent visitors should contact the Alburquerque LGU tourism office to arrange participation. The experience is also bookable as a standalone package — listed as “Calamay Making and Asin Tibuok Experience” — through the online tour platform GetYourGuide, which pairs it with a guided visit to Sta. Monica Church and the Asin Tibuok salt works.

Practical Info

• Activity type: hands-on demonstration and participation
• Duration: approximately 5 hours for the combined GetYourGuide-listed package (Sta. Monica Church, Calamay Making, and Asin Tibuok manufacturing visit); the calamay-making segment itself is one part of that itinerary and its standalone length is not separately published
• Group size: [TO ENRICH: minimum/maximum participants]
• Cost: from ₱1,432 per person via the GetYourGuide package (includes roundtrip hotel pickup/drop-off in Panglao, Dauis, or Tagbilaran City, admission fees to all sites, and a calamay souvenir); when included in other custom countryside/cultural tours, cost is bundled into that tour’s package price and varies by operator
• Suitable age: general; children can participate with supervision

What to Expect

The session demonstrates calamay production from raw ingredients — the grinding of glutinous rice, the slow stirring of the mixture over heat, and the pouring into coconut-shell moulds. The stirring process is labour-intensive and visitors typically take a turn at the large cauldron. The finished product is tasted on site. The activity provides context for understanding why the Jagna and Alburquerque versions of calamay are regarded as the province’s most authentic.

Notes

• Source: BPTO Table 11 — Inventory of Tourist Attractions (verbatim source description preserved above)
• BPTO classification: “Shopping” / “Cultural Tourism”
• Related entities: Calamay (product, Jagna), Calamay Festival (Jagna), Asin Tibuok Site (Alburquerque), Sta. Monica Stone Church (Alburquerque)
• Booking platform, duration, and price resolved via Calamay Making and Asin Tibuok Experience | Bohol — Travel Buddies (accessed 2026-07-28), which describes this as a 5-hour GetYourGuide-listed package priced from ₱1,432/person, including roundtrip hotel pickup, admission fees, and a calamay souvenir. GetYourGuide’s own listing page could not be fetched directly (returns HTTP 403 to automated requests), so this is sourced from a secondary aggregator citing GetYourGuide as the booking platform, not the primary listing itself — worth re-verifying directly on getyourguide.com if precision matters for publish.
• Group size (min/max participants) remains unresolved. 2026-07-28 attempt: searched “getyourguide.com Calamay Asin Tibuok Bohol group size max travelers”, “Calamay Making and Asin Tibuok Experience getyourguide.com bohol”, and “site:getyourguide.com calamay alburquerque” (via Exa web search) — no result stated a group-size cap for this specific tour. A same-publisher article on a related Alburquerque tour (“Bohol Cultural Heritage Tour With Lunch Buffet,” travel-buddies.com) explicitly states no maximum group size is published for its private-tour option either, suggesting this may simply not be disclosed for these small-operator Alburquerque cultural tours rather than being findable with a different search angle. Did not find LGU/BPTO, Facebook, or TripAdvisor listings specific to this activity to check next round.