MANILA: Nearly 5 million people filled the streets of Cebu City with music and dance on Sunday, as they participated in Sinulog, the largest religious festival in the Philippines, commemorating the introduction of Christianity.
Observed on the third Sunday of January, Sinulog marks the 1521 event when Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan gifted a statue of the Santo Nino, the child Jesus, to Rajah Humabon, the native king of Cebu, who became the first local ruler to convert to Christianity.
The original statue is housed in the Basilica Minore del Santo Nino, the country’s oldest Roman Catholic church. It was founded in 1565, shortly after the arrival of the Spaniards and the beginning of Spanish colonization of the Philippines, which also resulted in Catholicism becoming its dominant religion.
Santo Nino has become one of the most venerated images and is present in many churches across the country. Every year, Catholics from across the country visit Cebu City to express their devotion.
On Sunday, 4.7 million of them gathered for the Sinulog parade, according to data from Cebu City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office.
Filipinos participate in the Sinulog festival in Cebu City, Jan. 18, 2026. (Cebu City Public Information Office)
Kristine Magnifica, a recent bar passer, arrived from Iloilo, some 200km from Cebu, to show gratitude for her success.
“Joining the Sinulog is my way of thanking him,” she said. “It’s not purely leisurely because joining these activities entails a lot of patience. And it’s really, really tiring considering that the sun is up and the walk is far.”
Sunday’s festival was the culmination of days of processions and special masses.
“It’s actually an accumulation of activities. You can probably say that the Cebuanos have been very, very busy for the past 10 days attending masses, processions, and activities that were actually conducted by the Basilica del Santo Nino,” Magnifica said.
“Today is the grand festival parade where participants from different municipalities and islands and regions in the country come to Cebu.”
The word “sinulog” comes from the Cebuano word “sulog,” meaning “movement of water,” and refers to the distinctive forward-backward dance steps that mimic the flow of a river.
The dance, which is performed during the festival, dates to pre-colonial times and highlights the region’s maritime culture. Its role in Catholic devotion is a fusion of Filipino culture and Christianity.
“Recent studies show that it’s very similar to the Tausug war dance … It was performed by our ancestors before the coming of the Spaniards,” said Dr. Xiao Chua, public historian and lecturer at De La Salle University.
“They were using it already for rituals, to ask for rain, and they began offering the Sinulog dance to Santo Nino … From a war dance, it became a prayer dance in Cebu.”
The public festival in Cebu City, however, is a relatively recent development. According to Chua, it was due to renewed devotion to Santo Nino around the 400th anniversary of the Christianization of the Philippines in 1965.
The Sinulog festival became a tourist attraction in the early 1980s, when it started to be organized by the local government.
For Chua, the public display of devotion is very much in line with Filipino culture and values such as paki-kipag kapwa-tao — respect, empathy, and concern for others — and bayanihan — community spirit, which are reflected in all large religious events.
“It’s part of the Filipino phenomenon,” he said. “(In) all of those festivals, you’re going to see that people want to worship together.”
