Victory Belano (Boat Making)

Overview

Victory Belano is a boat-making operation in Barangay Manga, Tagbilaran City, listed in the BPTO provincial tourist-attraction inventory under Industrial Tourism / Arts and Craft. Boat building is one of the traditional marine industries of Bohol, and the Manga area — adjacent to the waterfront — has historically supported small-scale vessel construction.

The operation is tied to Victor Belano, described in available sources as a multi-generational boat builder who constructs large pump boats up to 24 meters long, at a pace of roughly one boat every two months, for an estimated output of about 30 vessels a year. These figures come from a single secondary source rather than a site visit, so treat them as an indication of scale rather than a precise current count — worth confirming with the boatyard directly if the detail matters to you.

Location

Barangay Manga, Tagbilaran City, Bohol. Manga is a coastal barangay on the northern edge of Tagbilaran, near the Manga Public Market. A specific street address wasn’t available in the sources checked; the barangay hall or a local tricycle driver can usually point you to the yard.

Getting There

From Tagbilaran City center, Manga Barangay is accessible by tricycle or on foot along the coastal road; exact travel time will depend on where in the city you start.

Practical Info

• Visitor access: not confirmed — this is a working boatyard rather than a formal tourist site, so it’s worth checking locally (barangay hall or the yard itself) whether walk-in visits are welcome or advance arrangement is expected.
• Admission fee: none is documented, and a working boatyard is unlikely to charge one, but this isn’t independently confirmed either way.

What to Expect

Manga’s boat-building trade is described in a 2012 field account as knowledge passed down father to son. That account (focused on a Manga builder named Alberto Belano — possibly a relative of Victor Belano, though this could not be confirmed, so treat the two names as potentially but not confirmably the same family/operation) notes a shift in materials away from whole hardwood logs: builders increasingly buy commercial plywood and other milled lumber from lumber stores, and now also use fibreglass, because large trees suitable for whole-log hulls are no longer available on Bohol.

Outside Manga, Bohol’s boatbuilders more typically shape local hardwoods into outrigger bangka hulls suited to inter-island fishing and transport, rather than the larger plywood-and-fiberglass pump boats described above. Whether Victory Belano’s own current output leans toward one style or the other isn’t confirmed, so travelers with a strong interest in the craft may want to ask on arrival rather than rely on this description alone.

That materials shift carries a resource-conservation logic as much as a cost one: large old-growth hardwoods suitable for a single-log hull take decades to mature, and Bohol’s remaining forest cover can no longer supply them at the volume a working boatyard needs. Moving to milled plywood and fibreglass — materials that draw on managed timber and manufactured composites rather than felled old growth — is a practical adaptation shared by boatbuilders across the Visayas as old-growth stock has thinned, whatever the individual builder’s view of the trade-off between traditional material and long-term wood supply.

Pump boats of the size reported here — up to 24 metres — serve a working economic role well beyond Manga: vessels in that class are typically built for inter-island cargo and passenger runs or for larger commercial fishing operations, rather than the small outrigger bangkas used for single-family fishing. A boatyard producing at this scale sits upstream of Bohol’s wider maritime trade — the same fast-craft and RORO routes that carry passengers through the Tagbilaran City Tourist Port, and the fishing fleets that supply markets like Cogon and Dao, depend on a working supply of vessels built somewhere on the island.

Notes

• Nearby industrial tourism sites in Manga include Reputana Guitars
• The Manga Public Market and Balai Cacao are within the same barangay
• manga boat building — Balik sa Dagat Bangka Journey (2012 field account), accessed 2026-07-17.