City Declares Special Non-Working Day; 14 Million Residents Immediately Get Stuck in Traffic Going to the Mall

MANILA, PHILIPPINES — Malacañang declared June 24, 2026 a special non-working holiday in the City of Manila to mark the city’s 455th founding anniversary, a decision that was received with the particular joy Manilenos reserve for any occasion that means they do not have to go to the office, immediately followed by the particular despair they reserve for discovering that fourteen million other people had the same idea about where to spend a free day.

The Founding: A Brief History

Manila was founded on June 24, 1571 by Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, who arrived, looked around at the Pasig River delta, and decided this was an excellent place to build a colonial administrative center. Legazpi did not consult the existing inhabitants of Maynila, who were already there and had opinions, but this is broadly consistent with how colonial city founding worked in the sixteenth century, and we note it here for historical completeness rather than editorial comment.

Four hundred and fifty-five years later, the City of Manila is home to approximately 1.8 million residents within its administrative boundaries, 14 million in the broader metropolitan area, and approximately 400 people on EDSA at any given moment who have been there so long they have developed their own culture and government.

The Celebrations: Planned

Manila Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso announced plans to deliver his State of the City Address at the Quirino Grandstand, a venue chosen for its historic significance and its capacity to accommodate the number of people whose attendance is required for optics. The address was expected to cover the city’s progress on flood control, urban renewal, market modernization, and the ongoing philosophical question of what to do about the waterways, a question that has been on Manila’s agenda since approximately 1590 and which each administration approaches with fresh optimism and similar results.

Cultural events, parades, and a light show were planned for the Intramuros area, where the colonial walls remain standing in a spirit of architectural stubbornness that historians find admirable and urban planners find complicated. Tourists were expected in numbers large enough to justify a press release and small enough to not overwhelm the existing infrastructure, a balance the Tourism Department calls “managed enthusiasm.”

The Reality: Traditional

By 10 a.m. on June 24, MMDA reported that SM Mall of Asia, SM Manila, Robinsons Place Manila, and every restaurant in Binondo with a Michelin mention were operating at or beyond capacity. The LRT-1 recorded its highest single-day ridership since the previous holiday. A man named Mang Eddie who sells fishballs near Quiapo Church reported that he had run out of fishballs by 11 a.m. and was considering this either a personal triumph or a supply chain failure, depending on whether he had thought to bring more fishballs.

He had not thought to bring more fishballs.

Traffic on EDSA registered as “catastrophic” on Waze, which uses a color scale ranging from green (moving) to red (not moving) to a shade of purple the app introduced in 2024 specifically for the Manila metropolitan area on holidays, which it calls “EDSA Purple” and which traffic engineers describe as “a condition.”

Historical Reflection: Available

At Intramuros, a group of students from Cavite were observed on a school trip that had been rescheduled from a weekday to the holiday, which their teacher described as “logistically complicated but patriotically correct.” The students toured the walls, asked several excellent questions about the Spanish colonial period, took photographs in front of Fort Santiago, and then asked if there was a Jollibee nearby.

There was a Jollibee nearby. There is always a Jollibee nearby. This is one of the continuities of Manila life that four and a half centuries of history have not disrupted, and which Legazpi, had he known about it, might have found either delightful or baffling, depending on whether sixteenth-century conquistadors could conceptualize a chicken joy.

The 455 Years: What Remains

Of the physical Manila that Legazpi founded, remarkably little remains. The original settlement near the mouth of the Pasig River was built, rebuilt, fortified, expanded, bombed, burned, rebuilt again, and surrounded by a metropolitan area of 14 million people who have collectively created one of the densest urban landscapes in Asia. Intramuros, the walled city that the Spanish built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, survived colonialism, American administration, and the Second World War, though the Battle of Manila in 1945 left it largely destroyed. What stands now is a reconstruction, a memory of a memory, but no less meaningful for that. The stones in the walls are real. The history they hold is real. The schoolchildren taking selfies in front of Fort Santiago are real. This is what a city looks like after 455 years: layered, complicated, partially remembered, and still, despite everything, full of fishball vendors who run out of fishballs by 11 a.m. on holidays.

Jollibee: A Constant

The presence of Jollibee in or near every significant Manila landmark is not incidental. The chain, founded in Manila in 1978 by Tony Tan Caktiong, now operates more than 1,800 stores in the Philippines and hundreds internationally. Its presence near historical sites, government buildings, schools, hospitals, and transport hubs is a function of its market penetration, which is essentially total. Asking where the nearest Jollibee is in Manila is like asking where the nearest wall is in Intramuros: the answer is always very close. The founders of the city could not have imagined this. They also could not have imagined air conditioning, smartphones, or Grab delivery. But they built something that lasted 455 years and is still being used, which is the only thing that really matters about a city.

For Manila city news and announcements, see Manila Bulletin. For Philippine history and culture coverage, visit Inquirer.net. For tourism planning in Manila, see Philstar.