At six o'clock this morning hundreds of runners set off to race around the city of Baguio, nestled in the mountains of the northern Philippines. Their 21km half-marathon finishes in the afternoon at the closing ceremonies of the annual Panagbenga Festival, a four-week festival that has kept thousands of volunteers busy for several months, closed off the city's streets and drawn over a half million people -- all because of flowers.
Baguio is well-known among Filipinos for the flora that blankets the city and its agricultural outskirts. Much as a trek up Yangmingshan has become a rite of spring for many Taiwanese, Filipinos have traditionally poured into Baguio during February for long afternoons spent knees-up in Burnham Park amid a cacophony of color. Nine years ago the area's horiculturalists, with the help of private and semi-private corporations, began capitalizing on the annual influx by sponsoring the Panagbenga Festival. Since then, the city government has become involved and helped turn the event into one of the Philippines' biggest yearly cultural expositions and a model for promoting tourism and boosting the local economy -- a model that Taiwan's own cultural council and tourism bureau would do well to emulate.
Extensive planning
"We've spent P$10 million (NT$6.4 million) on this year's festival. The most we've ever spent," said Benny Alhambra, the supervising tourism operations officer for the Baguio city government. The money went towards events and installations designed to draw crowds to the city every weekend in February; a flower regatta across Burnham Lake, an open golf tournament and body-building contest, a grand opening parade with a street dancing competition, followed the next day by a parade of dozens of floats accompanied by some surprisingly swinging drum-and-bugle corps. There was even a Japanese arts and cultural festival that brought some 300 delegates from Japan to demonstrate origami and sushi-making and model kimonos.
"This year was notable for a number of innovations," Alhambra said. "This was the first time that the city mayor has served as the festival's chairman; the first year we closed off [Session Road] to traffic in order to landscape the area, and the first year we've used the Athletic Bowl to host events."
For their efforts, the local government hopes to add two to three billion pesos to city coffers (NT$1.3 to NT$2 billion) and make future festivals even bigger.
"We hope to make the Panagbenga Festival as big as the Rose Bowl festivities in Pasadena," said Baguio Mayor Bernard Vergara, referring to California's famous parade of floats that marks the annual collegiate football game of the same name.
Vergara's determination to put his festival on the same footing with Pasadena's Parade of Roses is now well-documented.
An ongoing drought plaguing Baguio had drained Burnham Lake, the site of the festival's regatta. Instead of canceling race -- and to avoid having a giant mud puddle sitting at the center of the festivities -- the mayor ordered the city's department of water to refill the lake in time for the festival.
"We want the Panagbenga Festival to be an international event," Vergara told the Taipei Times. "It's our hope that word of the festival will spread to Taiwan and that Taiwanese will take part in future festivals much the way that Japanese participated this year."
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