History of Barangay Sta. Ana, Taguig City
Santa Ana is the part of Taguig that most people blow past on their way to somewhere else. It sits on the west bank of the Taguig River, right where the river empties into Laguna de Bay, hemmed in by Tuktukan to the north, Calzada to the east, and the water everywhere else. It’s tiny — the PSA-derived figures put it at about 22 hectares, which is why it clocks in at roughly 110,000 people per square kilometer. The 2024 census counted 24,174 residents. Postal code 1637, first district.
What makes it worth knowing is that this scruffy little barangay is old Taguig. The town was founded here in 1587, and Santa Ana was the poblacion — the municipal center — named for Saint Anne, the patroness. One of the nine original barrios. The 142 hectares it once covered have been carved away over the centuries as Taguig subdivided itself into the 38 barangays it has now, so what’s left is a dense, narrow-streeted pocket of the old town with two-lane roads that can’t be widened any further because the houses are already touching the curb.
The center of gravity is the church — the Minor Basilica and Archdiocesan Shrine of St. Anne. The Augustinians established the parish in 1587; the structure standing today is the third one, a Baroque-influenced building put up around 1883 after earthquakes in 1645 and 1882 flattened its predecessors. The National Historical Commission declared it a landmark, and in July 2022 the Vatican elevated it to minor basilica status, one of only about twenty in the country. Local devotion holds that St. Anne’s intercession helped drive the Japanese out of Taguig during the war.
Directly across from it is Plaza Quezon — named in 1937, while Manuel Quezon was still sitting as president, which is a distinction no other plaza in the Philippines shares. Quezon reportedly didn’t want his name on it and only gave in because the townsfolk insisted. Nearby, the Gabaldon building of Taguig Integrated School has stood since it went up between 1917 and 1928; it’s a museum now. Collegio de Santa Ana, the parochial school, has been on Liwayway Street since 1980. Old houses still stand along the side streets, many of them sagging and a few in real danger of coming down.
Every July the river takes over. The Santa Anang Banak Festival grows out of a folk story about St. Anne and the child Mary appearing to starving farmers in 1587 and leading them to a river suddenly thick with banak, or mullet. It builds for two weeks and ends on July 26, the feast day, with the Pagodahan — a fluvial procession of some two hundred boats carrying the saint’s image, crews flinging fruit and candy at the crowds on the bank while spectators show up with umbrellas and baseball gloves. There’s a regatta, a boat-decorating contest between barangays, and a cleanup drive beforehand. The city leans hard into its “probinsyudad” branding around all of it — province and city jammed into one word — and the festival is the proof-of-concept.
The honest part is that Santa Ana is being squeezed. This is a barangay where a mall sits a few meters behind the old cemetery and its Spanish-era domed mortuary chapel, where traffic on roads built for karitela now has to absorb Metro Manila volume, and where the same flooding that hits the rest of low-lying Taguig hits here first because it’s at the river mouth. Taguig’s money and attention are all up in BGC and Arca South. Santa Ana gets the heritage plaques and the annual photo op, and then gets left to deal with the drainage.
So: a 440-year-old former town center, a basilica, a plaza with a story, a river festival, and a whole lot of people living on top of each other in a space the size of a few city blocks. That’s the barangay.
The Taguig Church as it stands today, and the fluvial procession on the river during the July festival.
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