Calamay Festival

Overview

The Calamay Festival is held in Jagna, Bohol, celebrating the municipality’s identity as the home of the iconic calamay delicacy — a sticky, sweet confection made from ground glutinous rice, coconut milk, and brown sugar. The festival marks the calamay tradition as a point of civic pride and a driver of local commerce.

Jagna held its first formal Calamay Festival April 28–30, 2015, at the Jagna Municipal Plaza, marking what organizers described as a 190-year-old calamay tradition in the town — dating the craft’s local origin to roughly 1825. Local accounts attribute the delicacy’s introduction to an Augustinian Recollect friar, Fr. Mariano Gutierrez, who served the parish sometime between 1825 and 1855 and is said to have worked out the recipe himself. The festival was conceived partly to honor the “original calamay makers from Can-upao,” a sitio credited with preserving the technique across generations.

Calamay itself is a slow-cook confection: ground glutinous rice, coconut milk, and brown sugar syrup (latik) reduced over low heat, traditionally hand-stirred continuously for four to six hours, then packed into coconut shells (bagol) sealed with coloured crepe paper — red for the classic version, purple for ube. That labour-intensive method is exactly what the festival exists to showcase and reward: producers such as Ching’s Calamay, still operating out of Can-upao, run the process out of small home-based workshops rather than industrial kitchens, and a public festival built around cooking demonstrations and tasting events gives that small-batch trade a yearly platform it wouldn’t otherwise get. The economic logic is direct — a festival that draws visitors to watch calamay being made and buy it on the spot puts income directly into the hands of the same producers who keep the 200-year-old technique alive, rather than leaving it as a quiet local specialty sold only at the market.

Find places to stay across Jagna, Bohol

Location

Jagna, Bohol. Events are held in the town centre and port area, where the calamay trade is concentrated.

Getting There

Jagna is accessible from Tagbilaran by bus or van (approximately 1.5 to 2 hours). The municipality also has a working ferry port with connections from Cebu and Mindanao.

Practical Info

• Festival timing: held annually in late April on essentially the same dates as the inaugural 2015 run (April 28–30) — the 3rd edition ran April 27–30, 2017, and the festival was still being held on April 28 as of 2026 (that year’s edition scaled back under municipal austerity measures)
• Entrance: generally free for street events; some individual activities, such as the pageant, may be ticketed separately — confirm current pricing locally or with the municipal tourism office
• Accommodation: limited in Jagna town; Tagbilaran and Anda are the nearest bases

What to Expect

Based on the inaugural 2015 program: Day one featured free calamay tastings, cooking demonstrations, calamay-making contests, parlor games, kite flying, and an evening dramatic presentation on the delicacy’s history, with local transport decorated in calamay-themed designs. Day two featured folk and balak (poetic verse) dance competitions at the Jagna Business Center and a Miss Jagna Festival pageant at the CMM Quadrangle. Day three closed with a winners’ parade and an evening street celebration.

The core street-festival elements carried through to later editions: the 3rd Calamay Festival (April 27–30, 2017, at Goyo Plaza) again featured a motorcade of calamay-decorated motorela and habal-habal, free calamay tasting, a traditional cooking demonstration, and a giant inflatable calamay centerpiece. The Miss Jagna Festival pageant, however, was dropped from the Calamay Festival program after 2017 — it was not held again until 2023, and by then had shifted to Jagna’s September town fiesta (feast of St. Michael) rather than the Calamay Festival. The 2026 edition was scaled back to a simplified, subsidy-focused event (the municipal government supplying ingredients to calamay makers rather than staging the traditional large-scale program) under municipality-wide austerity measures.

The festival’s naming of Goyo Plaza as a venue also ties it to a separate strand of Jagna history: the plaza takes its name from Captain Gregorio “Goyo” Caseñas, memorialised there by a statue erected in 2011, who led Bohol fighters against American forces at the Battle of Lonoy in 1901. The Calamay Festival and that history sit in the same town square without overlapping — one a food and livelihood celebration held every April, the other a fixed historical monument — a reminder that Jagna’s civic calendar carries more than one thread, alongside the Pandayan Festival held separately in upland Barangay Lonoy each February.

Notes

• Related entities: Calamay (product, Jagna), Ching’s Calamay (producer, Jagna), Calamay Making (cultural activity, Alburquerque)

Related

• All Bohol festivals by month
• Things to do in Bohol in April
• Jagna
• Bohol food & culture
• When to visit Bohol