Excavations at the Old Tanauan Church Ruins in Talisay, Batangas

The ruins of the old stone church of Tanauan, long overlooked by casual visitors, came to scholarly attention in 2010 when human skeletal remains were accidentally unearthed during landscaping activities within the grounds of Club Balai Isabel, a resort hotel in the northern Batangas Municipality of Talisay.

This unexpected discovery compelled the National Museum of the Philippines to initiate formal archaeological work the following year, transforming the site into one of the most important windows into the early colonial history of Batangas¹.

The excavations were conducted under the auspices of the National Museum’s Archaeology Division. The project was led by Timothy James Vitales, with archaeologists Rhayan Bautista and Princess Pagulayan as principal investigators.

Their field report, completed in March 2011, remains unpublished but is repeatedly cited in scholarly bibliographies and heritage studies.

The image above is an AI-generated depiction of the archeological dig at the old Tanauan church.

A preliminary inspection had been carried out months earlier by Nida Cuevas and Vitales before the full excavation was undertaken in February-March 2011. This confirmed the presence of burials and stonework consistent with Spanish-period ecclesiastical construction².

The archaeological process followed systematic excavation methods. Trenches were laid out around the visible standing walls and in areas where burials had been reported. The soil layers were carefully excavated one by one to separate the collapsed building materials from areas that had remained undisturbed.

The surrounding soil, along with any artifacts and bones, was recorded exactly where it was found before being carefully removed. This procedure allowed the archaeologists to establish a chronological sequence, from the collapse of the structure in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, down to the lower layers containing articulated human burials³.

The discoveries included both parts of the old building itself and evidence of how the site had been used for burials. The surviving walls were built with mortar composed of lime, sand, and abundant shell inclusions, while the upper portions used volcanic rock and ceramic fragments, bound by lime and sand. Internal stucco or paletada was still visible in patches, and smaller adobe buttresses were noted.

In the lower excavation layers, articulated skeletons — meaning bones that are still connected to other bones — and disarticulated bone fragments were recovered, demonstrating that the site had been reused as a cemetery after the catastrophic Taal Volcano eruption of 1754, which forced the relocation of Tanauan to a safer inland site⁴.

The implications of these discoveries are manifold. At the local level, they reassert the historical significance of Talisay as the original location of Tanauan, which in turn anchors the town’s early history more firmly to the lakeside communities around Taal Lake.

More broadly for Batangas, the finds underscore how communities adapted to disaster by repurposing abandoned sacred space for continued ritual use. The reuse of the ruined church as a burial ground suggests a resilience in religious and cultural practices, a continuity that bridged the traumatic rupture of forced relocation.

For Batangas historiography, the excavations add a crucial archaeological dimension to a narrative long dominated by Spanish-era textual records. The ruins attest to the architectural strategies employed in early colonial ecclesiastical building, while the burials supply material evidence of how local populations negotiated calamity and memory.

By combining the building remains with the study of the bones found at the site, the Balai Isabel excavations enrich our knowledge of the intersection between colonial imposition, natural disaster, and community resilience in Batangas history⁵.