FORT PILAR

My mom, dad, the boys and I wanted to take photos and go around Zamboanga so we decided to go to Fort Pilar yesterday. That's a centuries old Fort a distance away from our home and is located beside the sea. From vistapinas.com:


If Manila has Intramuros, Zamboanga City has Fort Pilar. The fort is officially called the Real Fuerza de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza, which roughly means the “Royal Force of Our Lady of the Pillar of Zaragoza.” The Virgin Mary reportedly miraculously appeared on a pillar in Zaragoza, Spain, on October 12, 1492, the first time she manifested herself on the Iberian peninsula. This led to the Christianization of the Hispanics from the Moors and October 12 then became the feast day of Our Lady of the Pillar. The “Charter of Zamboanga City” was signed into law as Commonwealth Act No. 39 on October 12, 1936 and subsequently, the Our Lady of the Pillar became the city’s patron saint. A statue of the Lady is found on the east wall of Fort Pilar.
The fort itself was built on June 23, 1635 by the Jesuit Melchor de Vera as a military defense structure against the Moros and pirates. It was originally named as Real Fuerza de San José, before taking the name of Our Lady of Pillar in 1719. Today, the fort stands as a religious shrine and open air masses are held here every Sunday.





Close up of the image and the altar. When we arrived, there was a mass going on so we quietly waited for it to finish before we went around to take photos.
As was mentioned above, this is the east side of the Fort.


Mommy took this photo. Looking at my hair I could say that the hair vitamin capsules work, wouldn't you think so? =D Anyway, Nikki is clutching a bunch of candles (which I bought for only P10). We will light those later on...

By the fountain. My mom had to get several shots because the first ones were blurry. A few years ago this fountain did not exist. I must say it's a refreshing addition to the place.

By the cross. This is where people pray first before lighting the candles. A prayer is engraved onto a tablet at the foot of the cross. This has always been here for as long as I could remember but the cross has been wonderfully redone.

After saying our prayers and lighting the candles. Sometimes, there would be soooo many candles it looks like this whole stretch would be on fire. Now there are only a few. Maybe because it was a weekday. Nikki looks so worried about getting too close to the candles.

More prayers before the image. There are a lot of people at the altar. Some of them say their prayers in front of the image of Jesus and sometimes wipe the image with their hankies for blessings and luck. You could see how Ethan is quite attached to my dad (literally and figuratively as well).



By the bells. And there's my mom. Nikki didn't want to go up the ledge. He was scared and was telling my mom to put him down so he wasn't smiling at all in this photo.





We had to go home after this because it was getting dark. I had fun going back to Fort Pilar. Too bad the museum was closed. It would have been nice to take more photos in there. Well, maybe next time. But we did have a lot of fun. Maybe next week we could go to Pasonanca and take photos there as well.