MERRYMAKING RETURNS | The Baguio Flower Festival, the summer capital’s most popular tourist attraction for the past two decades, returns with full in-person activities this month as COVID-related restrictions ease further. On Wednesday, Baguio City opened the festival, also known as Panagbenga, with a street dance parade. —(Photo by EV ESPIRITU / Inquirer Northern Luzon)
BAGUIO CITY, Benguet, Philippines — The city’s normally congested roads were almost empty on Wednesday morning when this year’s Panagbenga (Baguio Flower Festival) formally opened with a parade of students in colorful flower-themed costumes.
For the first time since the government imposed restrictions at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the 27th edition of the monthlong festival is restaging its crowd-drawing street dance and floral float parades later this month.
A relatively thin crowd of residents and tourists along downtown Baguio watched the children dance to the music performed by their respective drum and lyre bands. Many chose to stay home because classes were suspended on Wednesday. In previous festivals before the pandemic, Baguio residents would prefer to watch the events on television instead of joining thousands of visitors in the city center.
According to the city tourism office, students from four elementary schools participated in the opening festivities.
Janah Galvez, 12, a Grade 6 student at Lucban Elementary School, said she did not mind waking up and proceeding to the parade grounds at 5 a.m. from La Trinidad town in Benguet province, where her family lives. The temperature in Baguio was 14.3 degrees Celsius by 8 a.m.
The city government is relying on the flower festival to help speed up Baguio’s recovery.
Panagbenga was conceived in 1995 to draw back residents and tourists after the summer capital was devastated by the 1990 Luzon earthquake.
‘Renaissance’
“The pandemic has taken so much from us. It took away all of our excitement and enthusiasm,” said Baguio Rep. Marquez Go during a program at the Melvin Jones grandstand after the parade. He described the return of Panagbenga as a “renaissance.”
“We are in the same micro situation today,” referring to the actual European Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries, which brought “hope and promise” after the Middle Ages, which was marked by strife, plague, and war.
“We can say the dark days [of COVID-19 and the economic impact of community lockdowns] are over,” Go said.
Before declaring the festival officially open, Mayor Benjamin Magalong stressed that the city “is moving toward a post-pandemic world.”
Magalong urged residents to become “the collective voice of excitement.”