Cervantes, Philippines

History

The earliest known historical document about Cervantes was that it started as a small Igorot Village known as “Mantamang”, an Igorot word meaning “to look over”. Igorot traders and Chinese merchants who always had to pass the village frequently used trails connecting the lowland and upland neighboring localities.

On March 4, 1879, the residents of Mantamang petitioned that the village be recognized as a Christian town under the district of Lepanto-Amburayan. The town was given the name Cervantes and that remained the name of the town up to the present.

Maximo Lilio de Garcia has written that Cervantes was formerly a barrio when it was founded by the Spanish colonizers. It started with only thirty houses made of light building materials like bamboo and cogon. In spite of the fertile lands that abound the place, the natives used to cultivate only small patches of rice fields, which limited the development of the barrio.

Lilio further stated that Cervantes has a distance of 24 kilometers from Lepanto. The system of communication was maintained on a weekly basis due to the poor road network that traversed the mountains - zigzagging upward the hills back of Cayus where the storage house was located and down to the lowlands reaching the Malaya River, which sometimes overflows during the rainy season, making the trail slippery.

From the History section of Cervantes, Ilocos Sur on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.