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.