Cimarrones Festival
PILI, CAMARINES SUR – this capital town celebrates the Cimarrones Festival in honor of tribesmen who were mentioned on record to have roamed the areas in the slope of Mount Isarog in the 17th century.
Cimarrones are members of a warrior tribe who tried to resist the
invasion of Spanish colonizers and it is in honor of the bravery of the
natives that the Cimarrones Fesival, now on its 8th year, is held every
3rd week of October.
Last 2012 according to statement of Mayor Bongalonta, 15 public elementary schools and high schools in the 26 villages there participated in the “Cimarrones” street dancing contest to get a piece of the Php. 200,000 worth of cash and government projects that were awarded by the local government to participating schools this year.
Bongalonta said the festival was created as a historical tribute by the
people of Pili to their tribal ancestors whose warriors frequently
fought the Spanish colonizers at the foot of Mt. Isarog in the 1600s in
efforts to resist invasion.
The conversion of the natives to Christianity sometime in 1712 made them the first devotees of
Our Lady
of Peñafrancia and paved the way for their assimilation to the ways of
the colonizers. Spanish missionary Don Miguel Robles de Covarrubias
convinced the Cimarrones to build the first nipa chapel for the
patroness of Bicolandia, which now stands as the Peñafrancia Shrine in
Naga City.
