Manila carries 450 years of layered history: Spanish galleon wealth, a revolution fought in secret societies, American colonial planning, and the second-most-destroyed city of WWII. Its scars and survivals sit side by side across a few square kilometres.
Spanish citadel begun 1593 at the Pasig river mouth, guarding the walled city. The Rizal Shrine museum holds his last poem, smuggled out in an oil lamp, and brass footprints trace his final walk to execution. Open 8am–6pm daily.
Set in a reconstructed Spanish-era casa opposite San Agustín, with capiz-shell windows and hardwood floors. Serves Filipino-Spanish colonial dishes — paella, callos, adobo — that fed the friar and merchant classes of Intramuros.
Completed 1607, the oldest stone church in the Philippines and a UNESCO site. It survived seven earthquakes, British occupation in 1762 and the 1945 shelling that flattened everything around it. The 1898 Spanish surrender was signed here.
A meticulous 1980s recreation of an 1850s Binondo merchant's house, furnished with period antiques: the azotea, the caida receiving hall, the latrina with two seats side by side. Shows how elite mestizo families actually lived under Spain.
Housed in the 1921 American colonial legislature, gutted in 1945 and rebuilt. Its centrepiece is Juan Luna's Spoliarium, the 1884 Rome gold-medal canvas that Rizal called a portrait of colonised suffering. Closed Mondays.
The 1913 obelisk by Swiss sculptor Richard Kissling stands over Rizal's remains. A hundred metres away, life-size bronzes reenact the 30 December 1896 dawn execution by firing squad, the moment that turned a novelist into a revolution's martyr.
17,184 graves in curved marble arcs, the largest US military cemetery outside America, plus 36,286 names of the missing on the hemicycle walls. Mosaic maps trace the Pacific campaigns from Bataan to Leyte Gulf. Open 9am–5pm.
Guillermo Tolentino's 1933 monument to Andrés Bonifacio, founder of the Katipunan secret society that launched the 1896 revolution, faces the 1941 art deco City Hall with its clock tower — one of the few American-era civic buildings to survive the war.
Three floors on the Chinese in Philippine life since the 10th century — the Parián ghetto outside the walls, the 1603 and 1639 massacres, mestizo intermarriage that produced Rizal himself. Life-size dioramas of galleon-trade labour. Tue–Sun 1–5pm.
The Black Nazarene arrived from Mexico by galleon in 1606; millions join its January procession. Plaza Miranda outside was bombed in 1971 during a Liberal Party rally, an attack Marcos used to justify suspending habeas corpus a year before martial law.
Founded in the 1850s when Chinese were barred from Catholic burial grounds. Mausoleums here have air conditioning, chandeliers, kitchens and mailboxes. The Chong Hock Tong temple dates to 1878, and Japanese occupation execution sites are marked.
Manila's premier commercial street from the 1890s to the 1960s, lined with art deco survivors: the 1928 Regina Building, the 1938 First United, the Calvo Building of 1938. Upper floors now hold artist studios and a small Escolta museum.