Text and photos by Diana B. Noche
The Paco Park is not your kind of recreational park where children run around and make all kinds of merrymaking shrieks. It is more of a serene and romantic garden, all of 4,100 square meters, small by Luneta Park standard, and exists in its cherished isolation, away from the wearying social effects of Manila’s “citification.”
Paco Park, with its ancient trees and walled intimateness within thick adobe walls, steeped in the old-world allure of a vanished era, is a well-favored venue of couples who want a quiet garden-like concept.
The fact that Paco Park used to be a cemetery has not caused a bit of apprehension among wedding guests. Truth is, its being an old cemetery is the park’s foremost come-on. Especially when you realize that the park’s most notable tomb belonged to Dr. Jose Rizal.
Paco Park was called Cementerio General de Dilao, Manila’s old municipal cemetery built by the Dominicans during the Spanish colonial period. It is about two kilometers away from Intramuros, the original Manila, and is located on the eastside end of Padre Faura Street.
The cemetery is circular in shape, with an inner circular fort. Its walls were made hollow to serve as niches. The top of its walls has pathways for promenades. A small chapel with a dome was built inside the cemetery in honor of St. Pancratius, a Roman citizen who converted into Christianity and was beheaded in the year 304 at age 14 for refusing to renounce his faith.
The cemetery was principally built to accommodate the dead of affluent and aristocratic families living in Manila.
During the 1800s, the cemetery was expanded to provide for those who perished during a cholera epidemic in the city. Construction started in 1807 with Don Nicolas Ruiz planning the design. Don Jose Coll supervised the construction work.
On Dec. 30, 1896, Dr. Jose Rizal was executed by a firing squad in Bagumbayan after his incarceration in Fort Santiago. His body was hastily removed from the site and dumped—clothes, shoes, and all—in an open grave at the Paco Cemetery. The grave was unmarked.
Jose Rizal’s sister, Narcisa, after a series of searches finally came upon Paco Cemetery where some guardia civiles milled about, watching out for Katipuneros’ attack. Narcisa bribed her way to get to her brother’s grave which she promptly marked with Jose Rizal’s initials, inverted to RPJ—Rizal Protasio Jose.
In August 1898, Narcisa asked the new regime under the United States to exhume her brother’s remains. The body had totally turned to dust, except for his shoes. Rizal’s body had not been placed in a coffin. The bones were washed and re-interred at the same site.
In 1901, the US government approved the use of Luneta Park to be the location for a Rizal monument. His remains were exhumed again and washed, placed in an ivory urn carved by Romualdo Teodoro de Jesus. In the 1900s, Jose Rizal came to be venerated as the National Hero.
On Dec. 30, 1912 the urn was deposited in the center of the monument base in a ceremony fit for a hero, with Sergio Osmeña and Rizal’s good friend, Mariano Ponce, joining the procession. Meantime, interment at the Paco Park and Cemetery ceased in 1912.
During World War II, the Japanese forces used the cemetery as central supply and ammunition depot. The high thick walls around the cemetery were a perfect defense.
After the war, the cemetery ruins were repaired and restored to its original design. The cemetery was converted into a National Park during the term of Diosdado Macapagal.
The Paco Park, as the cemetery came to be known, became a venue for cultural events with the backing of Imelda Marcos during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. In 1980, the Press and Cultural Attache of Germany in the Philippines and Teodoro Valencia initiated a classical concert at the park during the Philippine-Germany month which subsequently became a regular free Friday night tradition—the “Paco Park Presents.”
Still entombed on the circular walls are 65 people, including 22 children. The oldest niche is that of Dorotea Mateo who died in 1882.
Aside from Jose Rizal, other notable persons buried in the Paco Cemetery were Ramon Maria Llanderal Solano who was the Spanish Governador General (1857-1860), and the three martyred priests Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora after their execution on February 17, 1892 for their link to the Cavite Mutiny. All the grave markers or lapidas are in Spanish.
A promenade at the Paco Park is like being engulfed in an atmosphere of timelessness, of being detached from the ordinary world. It feels something straight out of the pages of Noli Me Tangere, being there with the guardia civiles, like mute witnesses to history, in a place that pulls us in by virtue of its rich past.