What Is Iloilo City really building at the 99-year-old Jaro Plaza?

By Noel Galon de Leon

I was jogging around Jaro Plaza one evening when something immediately caught my attention. Between the familiar trees and benches stood a row of white columns wrapped in bamboo scaffolding. For a moment, I slowed down. The plaza I had known for years was changing before my eyes.

As someone who frequently passes through Jaro Plaza, I have always thought of it as more than a park. It is where people wait for friends, grandparents watch their grandchildren play, students take a break after class, vendors earn a living, and devotees gather before or after Mass at Jaro Cathedral. It is a place where ordinary life quietly unfolds every day. Seeing new columns rise in a plaza that is nearly a century old made me wonder: What exactly are we building here?

The question is not whether the colonnade is beautiful. It is.

The real question is whether beauty alone is enough.

Heritage is often mistaken for something that must simply be preserved, fenced off, and admired from a distance. But heritage is not a museum exhibit. It is a living conversation between the past and the present. Every new structure added to a historic site becomes part of that conversation. It can enrich the story, or it can unintentionally rewrite it.

Jaro Plaza will soon celebrate its centennial. That milestone deserves more than cosmetic improvement. It deserves thoughtful reflection about what kind of public space we want to leave behind. Are these columns meant to make the plaza more functional for people walking under the tropical sun? Are they intended to frame the historic cathedral and reinforce Jaro’s architectural identity? Or are they simply another picturesque backdrop for social media?

These questions matter because architecture is never just about buildings. It is about values.

Public spaces reveal what a city believes is important. A plaza is where democracy becomes visible—not through speeches, but through everyday encounters among strangers. It is where people from different backgrounds share the same benches, pathways, and open skies. If we change a public space, we also change how people experience one another.

Perhaps what excites me most about these columns is not what they look like today but what they might become decades from now. Will children remember reading books beneath them? Will musicians perform there? Will festivals, conversations, protests, and celebrations continue to find a home in that space? Or will they simply become another attractive structure that people admire without ever truly inhabiting?

As I continued jogging that night, I realized that the scaffolding itself felt symbolic. It reminded me that heritage is always under construction—not only through concrete and steel but also through memory, participation, and public imagination.

Maybe the most important thing being built at Jaro Plaza is not the colonnade itself.

Maybe it is an opportunity for us, as Ilonggos, to ask a deeper question: When we renovate a place that has witnessed almost a hundred years of our collective history, are we merely constructing new architecture, or are we shaping the kind of community we hope to become in the next hundred years?

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the Secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.