MARIA AURORA, Aurora – A “balite” tree, carbon-dated to be between 400 and 600 years old and said to be among the oldest and biggest in Asia, has suffered from human abuse, as the Aurora provincial government and a family in Maria Aurora town try to settle a row over management of a park where the tree stands.

“Umaakyat ang mga tao. Inuukit pa nila pangalan nila. Nasasaktan ang puno (People climb it. They also carve their names on it. The tree is hurt),” Onassis Ronquillo, barangay chair of Quirino, said of the tourist-drawing natural wonder in his village at the foothills of the Sierra Madre.

This Ficus balete merr species towers as high as a five-story building, dwarfing the two-foot tree that Sen. Loren Legarda had planted on its far right. Its branches shade some 400 square meters of vacant space on the 12,500-sqm lot where it stands.

It takes 61 people with outstretched arms to encircle the tree, Gov. Bellaflor Angara-Castillo said.

Neglect is all over the place. Grasses are untrimmed while garbage litters the park. The two viewing decks and a function room are idle and dirty. A building on its left side is vacant.

Metal bars on the fence ringing the tree have been stolen. Some of the concrete posts have collapsed.

Suspended

Ronquillo said the development of the park was suspended due to an ongoing dispute with the provincial government. His family, which claims ownership of the property, was ready to sign a deed of donation in 2004 in exchange for a 12-percent share from proceeds of the park.

Angara-Castillo said she started developing the park in 2000 as part of the provincial government’s community-based program. The park was designed to bring in additional income to the farming village of 3,000 people, she said.

Ronquillo said the governor and the Department of Tourism had disagreed with the family’s demand, saying no funds would be left for park maintenance if the demand was granted.

Pork barrel

Part of the Countrywide Development Fund, derisively called pork barrel, of Angara-Castillo when she was Aurora representative, funded the construction of the facilities.

She said she ordered a stop to the park’s development in 2004 because Ronquillo put up a videoke bar near it and his family had no title to show for the property.

Ronquillo said the 12,500-sqm land is part of the seven-hectare property titled in the names of his parents, Eliseo and Dolores.

Now 77, Dolores said she and Eliseo bought the land from the Catipon family in 1952. “We exchanged it for rice mill and palay,” she said.

“I cannot recall the exact year but Eliseo tried to burn that tree so that we would have more land to till. He surrounded it with dry coconut fronds but the tree refused to die. So he just decided to let things be, maintained it as a playground for the children in the village.”

Eliseo, she said, was one of Quirino’s founders. Before he died in 1992, Eliseo had donated a two-hectare lot as site for the village’s elementary school. Another hectare was lost from the property because Eliseo also agreed to give it away for a road leading to the school, she said.

“I will resurrect the project once the ownership issue is settled,” Angara-Castillo said.

Both Angara-Castillo and Ronquillo said they wanted to care for the tree and resume the park’s operations.