Tarabitab- All About Ilocos, Pangasinan and Baguio City Philippines

Entering its 10th year of festivity, the Dagupan Bangus Festival has grown into an institutional trademark for the city of Dagupan, giving it a distinct symbol of identity derived from its most popular product – the milkfish.

More than just a distinctive brand for the city, the Bangus Festival has expanded in its scope and reach far beyond the city’s borders to now showcases what North Luzon has to offer to the country and the world, not just with the region’s variety of agricultural products but its colorful cultural tradition, its rich history and the warmth of its people’s hospitality.

In a short span of only one decade, Dagupan’s Bangus Festival can now claim to be the longest running festival in the country, held for one whole month beginning on April 1 and climaxing on May 1 every year, which is not just labor day, but also Pangasinan’s traditional Pistay Dayat or sea festival.

The festival captured the world’s attention in the year 2006 when Mayor Benjie Lim and festival organizers challenged and won the world Guinness record on the longest barbecue pit. To win that title, participants to the challenge put side by side 2,000 barbecue grills along a two-kilometer road at the heart of the city, the A.B. Fernandez Avenue and barbecued no less than 24,000 pieces of the city’s main delicacy, the bangus, bandied as the tastiest in the world.

A contestant in the contest for the biggest bangus grown in captivity, Anton Casseng, broke another record in 2010 when his entry weighed 5.75 kilos and measured 85 centimeters or just 15 centimeters short of a meter, a giant bangus it was indeed.

Only the wild cousins of the bangus whose capture is banned, those that lay the eggs that grow into fingerlings that are, grew that big in the past.

Like most other town and city fiestas, Dagupan’s festival featured street dancing as one of the mainstay activities from its take-off in summer of 2002. Since then, however, the city has made it into a competition.

City fathers invited champion dance troupes from the Ilocos region, the Cordilleras, Cagayan Valley and Central Luzon to vie for fat cash prices in different categories of street dancing. They succeeded in featuring the best creative street dances from what was later to be organized as an economic unit called North Luzon Quadrangle or super-region.

That was long before the economic unification of North-Quad is yet to really take form.

Even more significant was what organizers of last year’s festival pulled off. By then, Bangus Festival had captured the imagination not just of the people of Pangasinan, but neighboring regions, Metro Manila and a growing number of overseas Filipinos. Easily a million visitors, local and foreign, partook of their favorite activities, from tasting delicacies to frolicking in the beach.

Riding on the growing popularity of the month-long festival, organizers invited towns and cities from as far as Tuguegarao in the north to Cebu in Central Philippines display their best fresh and processed food products in a trade fair they dubbed “Yaman ng Norte”.

“Yaman ng Norte” was another hit not just in showcasing the best that North Luzon produce in abundance, but also at matching producers and buyers, building a solid value chain for farm and fishery produce, and at exposing participants to best practices and appropriate technologies available for their use.

To date, the festival has developed a smorgashboard of managed events sustained for a month or even days longer. These include job fairs for the young looking for decent work here and abroad, street dancing competitions, 101 ways of cooking bangus which pits against each other the best cooks who can whip up new recipes out of the milkfish, sports events that include basketball, bowling, karate, boat raising and mud wrestling, a fluvial parade up and down the Pantal River, the gateway of mighty Agno River to the Lingayen Gulf.

Top rated television shows, the likes of Party Pilipinas, have also been invited for live shows as entertainment features of the festival.

And usually on Pistay Dayat Day which coincides with labor Day in the Philippines, it’s fiesta in the beach here thousands have picnics along the Bonuan-Tondaligan two-kilometer beach front, prizes and plaques awarded and the concluding program.

For a touch of the 21st century, specially featured on Pistay Dayat day is Bodyfest Bikini Open competition when the country’s sexiest chicks display their assets.

Dagupan’s Bangus festival has indeed gone a long since Mayor Benjie Lim figuratively burned the midnight oil to come out with an distinct brand and identifying mark for the city and came out with the idea of packaging Dagupan as the Bangus Capital of the World.


Source: www.dagupancity.gov.ph

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