SHAINA MAY MANGAWANG BSBA MM 2-2 | ART APPRECIATION

Saludan Festival
Tigbauan, Iloilo

About:
Saludan is a cultural festivity organized to showcase the town’s distinct traditional activity in a
celebration of dance and music. A dialect used for the “crude method of threshing rice or catching
fingerlings through nets,” Saludan is one of Iloilo’s emerging festivals.
Aside from the way of life of the people of Tigbauan, the Saludan Festival also centers on the
town’s colorful history. Tigbauan was the site of the first Jesuite Boarding School for boys, the first
educational center in the Philippines; Furthermore, it is the home of a regional fisheries research
institution, the Aquaculture Department of the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center
(SEAFDEC); and the town is also the place where the American Liberation Forces landed on 18
March 1945 which led to the Liberation of the islands of Panay and Romblon. These milestones are a
source of pride for the people of Tigbauan.
Saludan Festival showcases Tigbauans’ unique culture presented in fishing or agricultural
scenes with its diversified livelihood strategy of Panalud, a Hiligaynon word coined from Salud or the
traditional way of gathering or accumulating things for their interest or value such as threshing rice
using a basket or catching fingerlings through nets.

Celebration:

The Saludan is held every last week of October.

How it is celebrated:
The festival is usually a four day event which opens with a food festival, Trade Fair, and a
Beauty pageant. The gem of the festivity is the tribe competition. The festival highlight is the tribe
performances that illuminate the Japanese experience during the WWII era with personal stories.
Symbolic of the defining event are dramatizations of some chilling reminders of its Japanese wartime
existence. The presentations will draw on the commemorative experiences of spectators watching by
capturing, in the audiences’ own words, their individual reflections on those Tigbauanons who have
sacrificed their lives during WWII.