The church is reached after a short brief orange tricycle ride from the highway into a wide open space that is the church compound where at the center, the imposing church of San Miguel Archangel is built and bounded by centuries old fence. When I was there last week, workers were busy doing landscape work at the front of the church.
The impressive church in San Juan is unique in the country in a sense that the buttresses, those architectural highlights found in many colonial churches in the country used to stabilize these structures from earthquakes, are built right infront of the facade. While in other structures it is in the form of thick columns like the ones in Santiago and Sta. Maria in Ilocos Sur, to cite a few, here it is a design statement.
The church of Bulacan, Bulacan, though beautiful, is quite a challenge to photograph. Even with a big front fenced space and my ultrawide angle lens, a Canon EF-S 10-22mm (16-35mm fullframe equivalent), one can’t still get a good architectural shot. Because of its bulk, width and height, framing the church in its entirety results to a tapered look, keystoning, as one is forced to tilt the camera up at an angle.
One of the beautiful churches in the province of Bulacan is found in the former capital with the same name: Bulacan that is located by the banks of the Bulacan River (yeah, it can get consfusing at first). An imposing site it is, the architecture is said to be a mixture of Baroque and Muslim. The construction of the church and convent started about 1578 and finished before 1762. It was occuppied and later burned by the British during their brief stay (when they also desecrated and looted San Agustin in Intramuros) which was then rebuilt.
The Cathedral of St. William the Hermit in Laoag City, Ilocos Norte with its unproportionally gigantic belfry, is the province’s famous landmark located at the banks of a river. Unlike the other churches in Ilocos, it’s the only one whose simplicity of a facade is almost lost with the overcrowding of columns, filling up vacant space in the lower and middle tier but suprisingly, the pediment is almost bare. Its a confusion, like a series of candles placed on a candelabra.
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