Date
Meaning & History
The City of Pasig was founded in 1573. It is one of the 16 cities making up the NCR of the Philippines. It has an area of 31.00 km2 and has 755,300 people living in it as of the 2015 census. The city shares its name with the Pasig River. The city is home to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pasig, based in Pasig Cathedral, a landmark built around the same time as the town's foundationThe city's name Pasig was believed to have come from the old Sanskrit word "pasega", meaning "sand" (similar to Malay pasir), which refers to the tribal community beside the sandy edges of the river. Some historians believed that El Pasig came from "Legazpi" (Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, the Basque explorer well known for being involved in the "Sanduguan", and was the first Governor-General of the Spanish East Indies.It was pronounced "mapaksik" by the Pre-Hispanic Chinese inhabitants of Binondo, Manila ("Mabagsik" is Tagalog for "terrifying" – depicting the river's raging current during the typhoon season, causing massive floods on nearby towns and villages, destroying wide hectares of farmland, and even bringing huge amounts of logs and water lilies from Marikina River, Laguna de Bay, and San Juan River towards Colonial Manila). "Mapaksik" later became "Pah-sik", and was then changed to what is now "Pasig". It may have also come from the Tagalog word "dalampasigan", which means "riverbank".According to Jose Villa Panganiban, the former director of the Institute of National Language, "Pasig" is another ancient Sanskrit word meaning "a waterway coming from one body of water to another," which briefly describes the river because its flow starts from Laguna de Bay, leading to Manila Bay