Casa Gorordo is a mansion built in the 1850s and inhabited by two elite families until 1979, when it was acquired by the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation which now manages it. We first visited in 2018.

Casa Gorordo has since had a face lift. Brightly painted walls face onto the interior garden

Photo by Lina Hervas

and a wonderful breezy upstairs terrace greets the visitors.

Photo by Lina Hervas

Casa Gorordo uses technology really well. This is a still photo of a changing tableau, a street scene from the colonial era. Laborers, merchants, officials and wealthy citizens walk through a market area. The scene takes about five minutes to “loop.” It is delightful.

Photo by Lina Hervas

The first room downstairs features displays on the Catholic faith as practiced in Cebu. Here is San Isidro Labrador, whose story I told you here: https://orionblair.wordpress.com/2024/03/02/guimaras/

Artifacts are beautifully displayed, well lit against a dark background.

The salakot or sarok in Cebuano
Two kinds of machete or bolo: the one on the left more multi-purpose, used not only in farming but for butchering meat and self-defense. These are essential tools for the farmer not only in cutting wood and sugar cane but in loosening the soil and removing weeds.
Bamboo tubes for collecting the sap of the coconut tree which is fermented into tuba
Stone and wooden mortars
A cacao “presser”: the roasted cacao beans are crushed and rolled out, then formed into tablets called tablea.
What is it?
A coffee grinder!
A wooden mill for grinding grain
A stone counterpart
Paddles and a trap for catching fish in flooded paddies

Before going upstairs, the visitor walks through a room that once stored the family’s carriages and, later, their cars.

A cow draws a cart loaded with the abaca fiber used to make “Manila hemp” rope.
A carabao or water buffalo pulls a sled loaded with rope.
A horse-drawn calesa or carriage
As in the nearby Jesuit House, rotten posts had to be replaced.
Dark and light wood alternates in the upstairs floor.
Lina remembers lace curtains like these from her childhood! The windows are made of capiz, a thin and translucent shell.
In the family chapel, a charming picture of a girl in her confirmation dress
And in the bathroom, a large freestanding tub!
I love the graceful curve of this post
that is incorporated into the formal geometry of an office.
An essential kitchen tool resembles a primitive animal sculpture. It is made for sitting
and the “business end” of the tool shows the teeth used to scrape the meat from a coconut shell.
A magnificent table setting in a dining room at the end of a series of upstairs rooms: these parallel the outdoor terrace that you saw above.
Spectacles and a boxed set of creta laevis colored pencils from E. Wolff & Son in England. https://pencilfodder.com/2023/05/01/e-wolff-sons-academy-chalk-pencil/

The elites of Cebu and the rest of the Philippines were not only very wealthy but well educated and well traveled – many studied overseas, especially in Spain. The national hero, José Rizal (full name José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda) attended the best schools in Manila and then became a student in Madrid, Paris and Heidelberg.

His two novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, perhaps original editions, are displayed at Casa Gorordo. Written in Spanish, they criticized Spanish colonial rule and in particular the Catholic Church, and they inspired both peaceful reformers and revolutionaries. His writing led to Rizal’s conviction on charges of rebellion, sedition and conspiracy. He was executed by firing squad in 1896, at the age of 35. The fact that these books are displayed probably indicates the family’s sympathy with the cause of Philippine independence.

Rizal was a remarkable man. “Documented studies show Rizal to be a polymath with the ability to master various skills and subjects. He was an ophthalmologist, sculptor, painter, educator, farmer, historian, playwright and journalist. Besides poetry and creative writing, he dabbled, with varying degrees of expertise, in architecture, cartography, economics, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, dramatics, martial arts, fencing and pistol shooting.” He was “conversant” in twenty-two languages! To learn more about him, you can begin here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Rizal

To visit Casa Gorordo on your own: https://casagorordomuseum.org/virtual-tour