NEWWORLD RECORD The 50.23-meter St. Vincent Ferrer statue in Bayambang, Pangasinan, enters the Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest bamboo statue.—WILLIE LOMIBAO
BAYAMBANG, Pangasinan — For 10 months, more than 600 people in this agricultural town worked together to build what is now considered the world’s tallest bamboo statue.
The Guinness World Records on Friday officially recognized the feat during the unveiling of the 50.23-meter statue of this town’s patron saint, Vincent Ferrer.
Town’s patron saint
Swapnil Dangarikar, Guinness World Records adjudicator, made the formal announcement as part of the town’s celebration of the 400th founding anniversary of the Saint Vincent Ferrer Parish (1619-2019) and 600th death anniversary (1419-2019) of the patron saint of builders.
The crowd, who attended the unveiling of the statue, burst into applause when Dangarikar announced the statue’s measurement.
Longest barbecue record
The statue, made of engineered bamboo with steel frame, is located at the St. Vincent Ferrer Prayer Park, a hilly area overlooking vast farm lands.
This is the town’s second Guinness record. The first is for the longest barbecue (8 kilometers), which the town made during its 400th founding anniversary in 2014. It snatched the record from Turkey.
‘First, unique record’
Dangarikar said the town did not try to beat a world record but set a “first, unique record” because “this is the first time somebody has attempted to make a sculpture of this scale.”
He said he imagined the sculpture to be big “but I did not know it was that huge and beautifully built.”
“We already saw the drawings before I came here so we knew it has support structure and is bamboo on the outside. The steel is OK but it has to be made completely of bamboo on the outside which I have checked. Also it has to be of a certain height to qualify for a record,” he told reporters here.
The statue is a project of the Kasama Kita sa Barangay Foundation Inc. and the brainchild of Mary Clare Judith Phyllis, wife of Bayambang Mayor Cezar Quiambao. Both are devotees of St. Vincent Ferrer.
Quiambao said the municipal government did not spend a single centavo for the project and that it was the foundation that funded it.
Local officials said there was no accident or casualty recorded during the construction of the statue.