Message of Senator Loren Legarda | Impressions of an Archipelago:Spanish Travellers and Writings on the Philippines | 16 October 2025

When Spain first arrived on our shores, it encountered a people who already governed themselves with order, traded across islands, and spoke in languages as diverse and expressive as the landscapes they inhabited. Long before the first chroniclers set ink to paper, the Philippines was already a nation of thought and discernment.

Today, we return to those early encounters through The Gallery of Spanish Travellers to the Philippines—a work that gathers centuries of observation, imagination, and exchange. From 1521 to the reflections of our own time, these writings form a map of how the Philippines was seen, and how we now choose to see ourselves.

For more than three hundred years, the Philippines and Spain shared experiences of faith, culture, and curiosity. Beneath every account written about us lived a people with their own memory and meaning, whose identity remained whole even as it embraced new influences. To read these works now is to witness the long conversation that has shaped our place in the world.

I supported this project through the Philippine Studies Program at Ruhr University Bochum in 2019. The Philippine Studies Program, an initiative I launched in 2017, was born from a vision to position the Philippines as a source of insight. Today, it spans 33 academic institutions worldwide—including Hamburg University and Humboldt University—advancing research on our history, languages, ecology, and memory. Each partnership reminds us that knowledge, pursued together, is the finest form of diplomacy.

How fitting that we present this book now, as the Philippines stands as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse. Published in Spanish, German, and English, this work gathers scholars from Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Spain, and the Philippines, offering twenty essays that trace how Spanish travellers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century saw and interpreted our islands.

Yet its value lies not only in what it recovers but in what it reclaims. For generations, others have written about us; today, we write with them, beside them, and in our own voice. In this exchange, we are reminded that history, when shared, becomes understanding, and that scholarship, when pursued with respect, becomes a bridge between nations. As we share this work with the world here at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, we stand proud of the Filipino story—resilient, creative, and genuine—as an enduring part of humanity’s larger journey.

Thank you.