Philippines

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Few countries changed colonial hands as abruptly as the Philippines did in 1898. Spain had ruled the archipelago for more than three centuries, since Miguel Lopez de Legazpi founded the first permanent Spanish settlement in the 1560s, governing it for most of that time not directly from Madrid but through the Spanish colonial administration in Mexico City, a reminder that the Philippines' Spanish name, honoring King Philip II, arrived by way of a different Spanish empire across the Pacific entirely. The Spanish-American War ended that in a single year: Spain ceded the islands to the United States in the Treaty of Paris, and a new colonial administration, an ocean away from the old one, began almost overnight. The Philippine-American War that followed was fought by Filipinos who had just finished fighting Spain for their own independence and now faced a second colonial power claiming the same territory. American rule lasted until 1946, interrupted by Japanese occupation during the Second World War, and independence finally arrived on 4 July 1946, a date the United States deliberately chose to echo its own.

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.