Magellan’s Cross: Protected From Its Admirers

For the occasion

The cross stands in a small eight-sided pavilion in the middle of Cebu City, beside the Basilica del Santo Niño. It marks a day in April 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan’s Spanish expedition baptised Humabon, the ruler of Cebu, together with his wife, his children and, in the words of the plaque at the entrance, “some 800 of their subjects”. A cross was set up for the occasion.

Thirteen days later, Magellan was dead, killed in battle on Mactan.

Layers

In the 1730s, an Augustinian friar reported that the cross had been covered with a wooden board, nailed on, to stop people taking pieces of it.

A century later came a building. In 1834, the bishop of Cebu put up the pavilion that stands there now, in coral stone under red tiles. By one account, it was meant to protect the cross from the weather, and from people chipping at it.

In the 1960s, its wooden gates were replaced with iron, and the ceiling was painted with the day the cross was set up.

One of the windows now has a camera fixed to its grille. And the cross itself is a case. What stands on the pedestal is a cross of tindalo wood, and according to the sign below it, the original is inside:

This Cross of Tindalo Wood Encases the Original Cross Planted By Ferdinand Magellan On This Very Site.

The basilica next door, which looks after it, is less sure. Its own history of the site concludes that Magellan’s cross “must have been long ago destroyed”, and that another was later put up on the spot.

Unlit

On the ledge below the sign lie red candles.

In the basilica, some candle vendors will pray for you. They hold the candles that carry your petition (an exam, a job, a visa) and say it aloud, sometimes with the Sinug, a swaying dance prayer: two steps forward, one step back.

After the fiesta of the Santo Niño in January 2024, the candles in the pavilion piled up about a metre deep around the base of the cross. The basilica said it would sell them, and use the money for scholarships for the children of the vendors and photographers who work around it.