Travel in the Philippines

Travels in the Philippines is a book by Juan Alvarez Guerra written in 1871 on behalf of the Governor General of the Philippines, Rafael Izquierdo. This work contains relevant ethnographic, geographical, historical and political data.
Juan Álvarez Guerra wrote three travel books about the islands. The first titled it A journey through the East. From Manila to Marianas, published in Madrid in 1872 and republished in 1883 and 1887. He dedicated it to General Rafael Izquierdo, governor general of the Philippines from 1871 to 1873, who had entrusted him with a scientific voyage through the Pacific from which the book was born. The second was Travels in the East. Manila to Tabayas, published in Madrid in 1878 and reissued in 1887.
Dedicated to the progressive politician Cristino Martos. And finally, Travel in the Philippines. Manila to Albay, published in Madrid in 1887 and dedicated to the liberal-conservative politician Germán Gamazo, who had been Minister of Overseas.
The Philippine experience made Álvarez-Guerra one of the greatest connoisseurs in his time of the reality and culture of those islands. In mid-1887 he was commissioned, as royal curator, to organize an exhibition on the Philippines. Forty-three indigenous people arrived from Manila for this exhibition, accompanied by 4,000 plants, two bulls, seven deer, several snakes, a carabao… The exhibition was inaugurated by Queen Maria Cristina on June 30 of that year.
Álvarez-Guerra prepared a special installation with the pieces and souvenirs of his private collection that was much commented by the press and attendees: books about the Philippines, textiles, embroidery, a collection of mollusks, samples of four hundred types of wood, weapons, etc.

“It is four o’clock in the afternoon of October 3, 1879 … 37° marks the centigrade, and two hundred and something deaths accuses the funeral statistics of the last week, being originated for the most part by a fever that doctors call I do not know how, nor do I care, but that I give the name of “thermometric fevers”, because I have observed that at home where a doctor “applies” a thermometer, there is a low in life, a piece of marble less in the workshops of Rodoreda, and one more page in the triennial records of “Paco”.
The “rent” of any of the rooms of the three floors that has the “neighborhood” of my respectable “Mr. Don Francisco”, requires an advance payment of three years; if at the end of that time the tenancy is not renewed, the eviction is made by pickaxe, without anyone having the right to complain, since the “landlord”, by “mouth” of the “Gazette”, has the magnanimity to grant a period of twenty days.
Why will the holy field be called “Paco”? This is a question to which they have never been able to give me an answer.”

Excerpt from the text