Last July I managed to do something really important: I finally got to scratch out Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar off my ‘places to visit’ list.
Las Casas Filipinas is a hotel/resort in Bagac, Bataan. What makes it so special? Well, twenty-seven (27) heritage houses from different parts of Luzon were painstakingly moved to this huge plot brick by brick, the process taking a total of fifteen years. The owners – the Acuzar family – spent a great deal of money in restoring these ancestral homes and are currently still in the process of expanding the resort.
This was one of the places near Manila infamous for the expensive rates and I truly had a hard time finding people interested to go with me and check this place out. Either they have already been there for a company event (it’s a popular place for conferences and seminars, apparently) OR they don’t think that it’s worth the long drive and the expensive rates.
Luckily I was able to find people in the office who didn’t belong to those two groups. My lunch mates at the office also were willing to allot a full weekend for this Bataan trip, and more importantly, willing to shell out the cash for the day tour fee. I suppose I’m lucky to have found kindred spirits who were interested in having an informal photo shoot in the place (because hey, if there’s one thing Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar is famous for, it’s the Instagram worthy backdrops). Between the seven of us, we managed to amass 600 photos, averaging about a hundred photos each. My camera even ran out of juice after just one day – a first, since I’m able to go on three-day trips without charging even once!
We almost cancelled the trip because a typhoon has just passed Manila, so the sky in our photos was downcast. We forked over PHP685 each for the day tour, which included entrance to the resort, welcome drinks and a one-hour guided tour.
They also had a package that included lunch, but we didn’t avail of it because we arrived at the resort around noon and we would’ve only had a few minutes left of the buffet spread. We ended up eating at La Bella Teodora, an Italian restaurant located in the house that was previously owned by the family of Teodora Alonzo. The food was good, if on the pricier side.
We spent a whole afternoon roaming the place, walking around the compound twice: once during the official tour, and another time by ourselves. We eventually left at around six in the evening because we had to make our way to the town proper and find the resort we were booked into. All in all I’d say that it was a sulit trip; sure it was expensive but the fact that the houses were restored to pristine conditions alone made it worth it.
