Message from the Governor

Asa ka masuyut as kanu mabendito a vayu a awan diaten atavu a maychakaydian du mavid aya kavayahan ta di-Vatan!

The year 2008 promises to be an exciting year for our beloved province, for various reasons. First we will implement the Batanes Eco-Cultural Tourism Program, which will spread the benefits of tourism to the community level. Second the recent hit movie Batanes, has placed us again in the limelight, and we expect more visitors to come this year. Third, we expect that the UNESCO will declare Batanes as a World Heritage Site, after years of painstaking work to document the outstanding universal values of the Batanes Cultural Landscape. 2008 therefore requires us to showcase the best of our heritage. The Batanes 2008 Calendar celebrates the natural and cultural aspects of this heritage.

Our province has began adjudge in the past as the best place to live in the Philippines, by UN standards, ahead of modern cities and provinces such as Makati, Cavite, Laguna, Bulacan and Pampanga. This means that we don’t have to be like others to be number one. What we have is already the best, and what we need to do is to nurture and protect it.

It is time for us Ivatans to appreciate and conserve our heritage, and its outstanding universal values. It is not only our gift to the world; it is also our best assurance that life will be sustainable in our isolated and small province. Our ancestors taught us how to survive beautifully, through hard work, by helping each other and by heeding the signs of nature. If we do not value and continue what our ancestors started, we will be vulnerable to the devastating forces of nature and the ill effects of unmanaged modernization.

The Batanes Eco-Cultural Tourism Program is the flagship program of your administration for the next three years. It has a “community stay” strategy where our homes will provide the rooms for our guest and our communities will be the reception areas. Through this visitors will understand and appreciate more the “living culture of the Ivatans”. And through this heritage conservation will make economic sense to our people, because the earning from tourism will be distributed over more families. The more that our communities conserve our heritage, the more families will benefit from it.

By adopting a community stay strategy we hope that our “kaydians” will finally take seriously our repeated calls to protect and conserve our heritage, the thing that makes us unique, and attractive as a province. We made this call in 1993 when we prepared the Batanes 2000 Master Plan. And through the years we kept repeating it. But every year we keep losing a bit of our heritage – old houses torn down giving way to modern structures, old streets changed, some values adjusted, some practices weakening. We hope that the treats to our heritage will diminish with our new tourism thrust.

I urge everyone to conserve our outstanding heritage by supporting our Eco-Cultural Tourism Program. Once more, an auspicious New Year to all! Kapian tapa nu Dios atavo.

HON. TELESFORO F. CASTILLEJOS
Provincial Governor
Province of Batanes