This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
An archipelago of more than seven thousand islands cannot be governed, or even easily described, as one undifferentiated landmass, and the Philippines has long organized itself around three island groups that function almost as three countries. Luzon in the north holds Manila and the bulk of the country's population and political weight; the Visayas, a scatter of mid-sized islands including Cebu and Panay, sits between Luzon and Mindanao and gave the archipelago much of its early Spanish-era name recognition, the islands Ferdinand Magellan reached in 1521; Mindanao in the south is the second-largest island, historically less integrated into the Manila-centered state and home to the country's largest Muslim population, a legacy of trade contact with the Islamic sultanates of maritime Southeast Asia that predated Spanish colonization entirely. The three-region structure is not a formal administrative unit so much as a geographic fact every Filipino grows up navigating, since moving between them, even today, more often means a flight or a ferry than a road.