Antequera: Bohol's Sunday Basket Market Town

Antequera sits about 16 kilometres north of Tagbilaran in the rolling inland hills of western Bohol, a fourth-class municipality of roughly 84 square kilometres and around 20,000 residents, bounded by Calape and Loon to the west, San Isidro to the northeast, Maribojoc to the southwest, Cortes to the southeast, and Balilihan to the east. It carries no coastline and no place on the mainstream tourist circuit, but its Sunday public market draws a steady stream of day visitors — mostly domestic travellers and Filipino-diaspora shoppers — as a distribution point for the rattan, bamboo, and pandan baskets, trays, and mats woven in household workshops across the municipality’s 19 barangays.

The town takes its name from Antequera in Andalusia, part of the same colonial-era pattern of Iberian place names applied across Bohol. It was constituted as a municipality during the Spanish administrative period, and the parish church of Saint Augustine on the town plaza — established by the Augustinian Recollects, with its current structure dating mainly to the 19th century — anchors the fiesta calendar around the 28 August feast day. The Sunday market itself functions as much as a social institution as a commercial one: families from outlying barangays travel in on Sunday mornings to sell handicrafts and produce, most active from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m.

The basket trade has a documented starting point: weaving in Barangay Bicahan is traced to 1911, when founding families began producing the bukag, a large, wide-mouthed basket originally built as a farm tool for carrying rice seedlings rather than as a craft object. Production diversified through new designs in the 1960s, and by the 1990s Antequera’s weavers had developed more than 500 distinct basket patterns, working in bamboo, banban, buri, nito, and uway (rattan). Government support — training and mechanized tools supplied through the National Cottage Industries Development Authority and the local government — helped the trade reach export buyers in Cebu and Manila on top of the domestic market. The industry’s cultural weight was formally recognised in May 2025, when the National Museum of the Philippines–Bohol devoted its National Heritage Month programming to basketry here, running lectures and hands-on workshops led by Antequera weavers under the banner “Bukag: Exploring the Craft, Heritage, and Sustainability of Boholano Basketry” — an explicit framing of the trade’s continuity as something that has to be actively maintained, not something that simply persists on its own. No published count of currently active weavers exists, and it remains a household-level trade rather than a factory operation: production happens across individual homes, so prices and available designs vary by weaver and are set through direct negotiation rather than a fixed price list.

The weaving heritage gets its own civic showcase in the Piskaya Antequera Basket Festival, held March 14–17 alongside the town’s Foundation Day, first staged in 2015 and now a fixture of the “Sandugo sa Bohol” province-wide festival lineup. The four-day program runs basket and agricultural display booths, a Women’s Day livelihood seminar and singing competition, the Tour de Antequera trail runs (21, 10, and 5 kilometres), and a Foundation Day parade and street-dancing finale. Outside festival week, the municipality also runs a formal Basket Weaving Experience Tour bookable through the municipal tourism office, meeting at the Municipal Tourism Information and Display Center in the poblacion, that takes visitors to household weaving sites for a fee that excludes onward transport.

A local specialty worth noting among the standard market foods — puso, grilled corn, roasted chicken — is budbud kabog, a millet rice cake wrapped in banana leaf and grated coconut, increasingly rare at urban markets but still made here by older vendors who keep the traditional recipe. It pairs with native tablea chocolate drink when available.

Antequera’s karst hills, largely overlooked because of the basket-market reputation, hold a genuine cluster of caves and waterfalls. Mag-aso Falls, a twin cascade of roughly 25 feet in Barangay Mag-aso, takes its name from the Cebuano word for smoke — a reference to the fine mist the falling water throws up, which can obscure the falls entirely from a distance; 197 concrete steps with metal handrails descend to the pool below, and a small cave tucked beneath and behind the falls is reachable by climbing the boulders, a route mostly used by local youth. A separate, unrelated formation nearby, Mag-aso Falls Cave, sends its own underground stream through a limestone chamber into interior pools, reached by a moderate jungle hike distinct from the surface falls trail. Inambakan Cave and Spring, on seven hectares of government land in Barangay Villa Aurora, doubles as a trailhead for the onward trek to Mag-aso Falls, with an underground river passage that shifts between ankle-deep and neck-deep water past a narrow constriction near the entrance; Mandahunog Cave and Spring, in Barangay Tabuan, is a smaller, colder spring popular with locals in the dry season. Further out in Barangay Tupas, Lake Tupas is a reminder of the 2013 Bohol earthquake’s lasting physical impact on the province: the roughly 40-hectare, 20-foot-deep lake did not exist before the quake, forming when ground subsidence created a basin over what had been a small forest creek. The regional tourism office and national fisheries bureau put initial funding toward kayaking, boating, and fishing development there in 2018, though no independent report since then confirms whether that plan was completed — a useful reminder that not every earthquake-era development pledge in rural Bohol reached full build-out.

What’s here, briefly

• Antequera Sunday Handicraft Market — the main draw: rattan baskets, woven mats, and bamboo furniture sold direct from producers, well below Tagbilaran shop prices.
• Antequera Cottage Industry (Barangay Bicahan) — the household basket-weaving trade tracing to 1911, with formal weaving-tour bookings through the municipal tourism office.
• Saint Augustine Parish Church — a modest Spanish-era church on the plaza with surviving colonial stonework on the belltower and facade.
• Mag-aso Falls — a 25-foot twin waterfall reached by 197 steps, with a small cave accessible behind the cascade.
• Inambakan and Mandahunog Cave & Spring — freshwater cave-spring sites in Barangay Villa Aurora and Barangay Tabuan, respectively.
• Lake Tupas — a roughly 40-hectare lake formed by the 2013 earthquake in Barangay Tupas.
• Abatan River corridor — the river’s upper reaches pass near the municipality, with informal barangay footpath walks possible.

Getting there

Jeepneys on the Tagbilaran–Antequera route leave the Integrated Bus Terminal on CPG Avenue North roughly every 30–45 minutes; the ride takes 30–40 minutes for PHP 20–25. Private vehicles follow the road north through Corella.

Travel tips

The Sunday market is the reason to make a special trip — any other day, Antequera is a quiet agricultural town with limited visitor services. Arrive before 9 a.m. for the best selection. There is no tourist accommodation in the municipality; Tagbilaran City, 30–40 minutes south, is the base for a day trip.

Other places to consider

• Corella — the next town north on the road toward the Rajah Sikatuna Protected Landscape.
• Balilihan — a neighbouring interior municipality on the same western Bohol hill corridor.
• Tagbilaran City — the provincial capital and the appropriate day-trip base.

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Location and travel detail reflect publicly available information as of 2026-07-16. Confirm market days and hours before travel. bohol-philippines.com earns a commission on bookings made through partner links at no cost to you.