When my friend and I were planning our mini road trip in Rizal, we came up with a handful of places to visit. I pitched the Windmill Farm in Pililla while she suggested the Petroglyphs in Angono. “You haven’t been?” I asked her in a surprised tone since she lives in the exact same town. “Never been,” she answered me. “Great, same here,” I told her. Problem solved. Ditching spontaneity, we now had a solid road trip destination.
The Neolithic Rock Art Petroglyphs of Angono
After taking our lunch at Balaw-Balaw Restaurant and Art Gallery, we drove off directly to the site of the Petroglyphs, located deep within the forested hills spanning the boundary of Angono and Binangonan.
The Re-discovery of the Angono Petroglyphs
Shrouded from the outside world by the thick woodland for many centuries, the Petroglyphs dramatically re-emerged in 1965 after a group of boy scouts accompanied by National Artist Carlos “Botong” Francisco stumbled upon an interesting cave during a camping trip.
It is said that while resting, Botong Francisco—who surely knows art when he sees it—noticed an arresting set of deeply carved lines and patterns hewn into the outer walls of the cave. Upon further probing, he recognized the faint outlines as a rare form of primitive drawings.
After properly reporting his historical discovery to the National Museum of the Philippines, a team of archaeologists led by Alfredo Evangelista immediately trooped to the cave to conduct research. Excavations on the site revealed fragmented bits of earthenware, flake stone tools, obsidian flakes, and other blunt instruments believed to date back as far as the Neolithic Age—or sometime before 2000 BC.
The Angono Petroglyphs also revealed a massive total of 127 individual drawings engraved inside the cave's rock shelter, occupying an area of 63 meters wide and 5 meters high. Many of the rock-art murals depicted thin-sized human and animal figures. A few were unfortunately left indistinguishable because of the natural occurrence of erosion over millennia.
An Educational Road Trip
After we safely arrived at the location of the Petroglyphs, a group of local school kids eagerly pointed us to the tunnel beside the signage where we should enter. The narrow tunnel, around 150 meters long, appeared highly dreamlike—as if one were stepping directly into another dimension.
We alighted out of it with a sudden view of a golf course (the construction of which unfortunately contributed to the deterioration of the nearby Petroglyph stone wall) before proceeding to the tourism center, where we formally met the local guide who accompanied us to the exact site of the Petroglyphs and narrated its fascinating history.
It was an educational road trip indeed to a place I’ve been meaning to visit for the longest time. Making this brief exploration of Rizal even more special was the fact that I was traveling with wonderful company.
Imagine being in a place where some of the very earliest inhabitants of the Philippines used to take shelter—like more than 2,000 years ago. I grew up believing our history started only when the Spanish arrived in 1521, but I know deep down that we have been actively charting our own history a long time before that.
I’m highly confident that, along with the Tabon Caves in Palawan, the Kalanay Cave in Masbate, the limestone tombs of Kamhantik in Quezon, and similar archaeological sites in Butuan, our country still successfully hides countless ancient relics that will suggest the historical presence of more advanced, early civilizations.
