Calape: A Small Port Facing Cebu

Calape faces the Bohol Strait on Bohol’s northwestern coast, looking across the water toward Cebu’s southeastern shore, one of a chain of coastal municipalities — Tubigon to the south, Clarin to the north — sharing a maritime character built on fishing, interisland trade, and ferry links to Cebu. The town is compact: a tight poblacion around the church and market, and a small port handling irregular passenger and cargo boats. Population runs around 30,000, split between fishing, coconut farming, and highway commerce, with a cluster of household craft industries in the interior barangays that outsiders rarely see on a quick pass through.

The parish church, San Vicente Ferrer, was established in 1802 under Augustinian Recollect administration before passing to secular clergy in 1898 and, since 1941, the Diocese of Tagbilaran. The present building is not the original structure: the neo-Gothic church seen today — pointed arches, a colonnade portico, rose windows, crocketed pinnacles — was built between 1933 and 1954 by local builders Eliseo Josol and Rosalio Real, modelled on the Santo Domingo Church in Intramuros, Manila, a deliberate departure from the Baroque style common to most Bohol churches. Its bell, cast in 1690, predates the current structure by more than two centuries and still hangs in the belfry. The October 2013 earthquake damaged the church, which was restored and reopened by 2019; the National Museum of the Philippines subsequently declared it a National Cultural Treasure, a designation formally announced on 9 May 2023. Before Spanish colonization, the coastal barangays here were part of the barangay-polity trade network with Cebu-based datus, and local fishermen still bless their boats during fiesta week.

That fiesta is the 10-day Pahinungod Festival, culminating each year on 10 May. The name comes from the Cebuano pahinungod — dedication, offering, tribute — and the celebration runs on two tracks at once: religious thanksgiving to San Vicente Ferrer, and Balik-Calape, an organised annual homecoming that draws migrant Calapeños back from Manila, Cebu, and further abroad specifically for the closing days. A competitive street-dancing parade along the coastal avenue is the visual centrepiece, staged in front of the Gothic church facade, alongside an agro-industrial trade fair and heritage exhibitions housed in the municipal hall.

Calape also carries a specific, documented role in Bohol’s Second World War history: on 27 February 1943, the town hosted the Calape Conference, which unified the civilian and military arms of the Free Bohol Government against the Japanese occupation. Carlos P. Garcia — then a resistance figure, later President of the Philippines — was among those who attended. Japanese forces were driven out of the municipality in 1945, giving the town’s wartime commemorative landmarks, including a flagpole in Barangay San Isidro, real historical grounding even where the precise link between a given marker and the conference itself isn’t documented.

Danggit (dried rabbitfish), produced in several coastal barangays and sold to Tagbilaran buyers, and fresh oysters harvested from the tidal flats of Barangay Abucayan, are the notable local seafood products alongside grilled squid served near the port. Barangay Liboron has more recently added cacao to that mix: a farm established there in 2014 by a returning overseas Filipino propagates heirloom cacao seedlings and processes the beans into tablea, the traditional Filipino drinking-chocolate tablet made by roasting and grinding the beans into a paste before shaping — part of a small but growing artisanal chocolate sector across Bohol that depends on exactly this kind of small farm supplying raw material.

Three household craft industries, largely invisible from the highway, run alongside the fishing and farming economy. Potters in Barangay Binogawan dig clay from a privately owned coconut plantation, temper it with sand hauled from the nearby Labu-on River, and finish pieces with a paint made from a locally quarried white stone unique to Calape among Bohol’s pottery communities — a household census in 2017–2018 counted 25 active potters, only two of them under 21, hand-building cooking pots, pot covers, and flower pots sold mostly through advance orders from resellers. In the neighbouring barangays of Bentig, Calunasan, and Mandaug, more than 20 households weave brooms from buri palm-leaf fibre, a trade tracing to the 1960s that now operates under the Calunasa Broom-Maker Association, which received close to half a million pesos in government livelihood funding in 2023; production swings from a handful of brooms a day in the off-season to several dozen during the New Year and back-to-school rush. On Pangangan Island, a shell-craft cottage industry in Barangay Kinabag-an turns locally gathered shells into frames, lamps, and jewelry — a livelihood tied directly to the health of the surrounding reef and mangrove, where overharvesting of wild shell stock is a recognised pressure on producing communities elsewhere in the country.

Pangangan Island itself, reached from Barangay San Isidro–Lawis by a 3.5-kilometre causeway built in the 1950s, is reportedly the longest such causeway in the Philippines — built from coral and limestone fill to replace a route that once required residents to wade roughly 4 kilometres through shallow water at low tide. The roadway sits barely two feet above sea level at high tide, which made it vulnerable to storm damage until a school principal began planting mangrove propagules along both sides in the late 1950s, an effort his successor turned into an annual community planting drive from 1961 onward. What started as roughly 6 hectares by 1982 has grown into an estimated 54 hectares of mangrove lining both sides of the causeway today, absorbing typhoon wave action that would otherwise erode the road itself — a rare case of a piece of infrastructure and a restored ecosystem sustaining each other by design rather than accident. The waters off Pangangan’s Barangay Lomboy carry a formally documented fish sanctuary, and the island’s dive sites run a reef-flat-to-wall profile typical of this stretch of the Bohol Strait.

Local tradition tied to a chapel in Barangay Bentig adds a further layer to the town’s religious life, separate from the parish church: residents hold that an image later known as Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, or Our Lady of Kalooy, was found around 1800 by a local fisherman in a shell at sitio Kalooy, which gave the devotion its name. The image, housed in a Takubo shell roughly seven inches tall, draws devotees from as far as Mindanao and Luzon on its 10 December feast day, some leaving jewelry and other ex-votos as thanks — a belief and practice reported locally rather than a claim this profile can verify independently.

What’s here, briefly

• San Vicente Ferrer Parish Church — the 1933–1954 neo-Gothic parish church modelled on Manila’s Santo Domingo Church, a National Cultural Treasure with a bell cast in 1690.
• Pahinungod Festival (10 days, ending 10 May) — the town’s patronal fiesta and homecoming celebration, with street dancing and a trade fair.
• Pangangan Causeway — a 1950s coral-and-limestone causeway to Pangangan Island, lined by 54 hectares of community-planted mangrove.
• Binogawan Pottery and Ben-Cal-Man broom making — two household craft industries open to visitors interested in how they’re made.
• Cecee’s Organic Farm and Cacao Nursery — a working cacao farm and tablea producer in Barangay Liboron.
• Birhen sa Kalooy Chapel — a pilgrimage chapel in Barangay Bentig tied to a local origin legend dated to around 1800.
• Calape port area — the small port and fish landing area, active in the early morning during fishing season.
• Coastal barangay mangroves — mangrove stands near Abucayan supporting crab and shellfish gathering at low tide.

Getting there

From Tagbilaran, Calape is 30–40 minutes by bus or van via the coastal highway northwest; buses from Dao Terminal bound for Tubigon, Clarin, or Sagbayan pass through. Habal-habal serve inter-barangay travel. The small local port handles irregular crossings to southern Cebu, though Tubigon, 10 minutes south, remains the primary Bohol–Cebu ferry terminal for this stretch of coast.

Travel tips

Calape combines well with a day trip to nearby Tubigon or Clarin from Tagbilaran. The church is the primary reason to stop; the plaza and market are worth a brief walk. Accommodation in Calape itself is minimal — Tagbilaran or Tubigon are the better bases, and the nearest ATM is in Tubigon town centre.

Other places to consider

• Tubigon — the primary Bohol–Cebu ferry terminal, 10 minutes south.
• Clarin — the neighbouring coastal municipality to the north.
• Cabilao Island — the dive island off the same stretch of coast, under Loon further south.

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