Naga, officially the City of Naga (; Central Bikol: Ciudad nin Naga; Rinconada Bikol: Ciudad ka Naga) or the Pilgrim City of Naga, is an independent component city in the Bicol Region of the Philippines. According to the , it has a population of people. It is the most populous city in Camarines Sur and the smallest city in Bicol by land area. On 26 May 2026, President Bongbong Marcos signed Proclamation No. 1267, declaring Naga a highly urbanized city. Under the Local Government Code of 1991, a plebiscite is required within 120 days to ratify the proclamation and formally convert Naga into a highly urbanized city.

The town was established in 1575 by order of Governor-General Francisco de Sande. The city, then named Nueva Cáceres (New Cáceres), was one of the Spanish royal cities in the Spanish East Indies, along with Manila, Cebu City, and Iloilo City, and is historically the third oldest.

Geographically and statistically classified, as well as legislatively represented, within Camarines Sur, but administratively and politically independent of the provincial government, Naga is considered the Bicol Region's trade, business, religious, cultural, industrial, commercial, medical, educational, and financial center.

Naga is known as the "Queen City of Bicol" due to the historical significance of Naga in the Bicol Region; as the "Heart of Bicol", due to its central geographical location on the Bicol Peninsula; and as the "Pilgrim City", in Camarines Sur since Naga is home to one of the largest Marian pilgrimages in Asia to the shrine of Our Lady of Peñafrancia, an image that is one of the country's most popular objects of devotion.Abella, D. The Bikol Annals. Manila Naga is described as "One of the Seven Golden Cities of the Sun" by Nick Joaquin.

Etymology

Naga is the native pre-colonial name of the city. It is named after the narra tree (Pterocarpus indicus), which is known as naga in the Bicol language. It was abundant in the region and was part of a pre-colonial industry of wooden cups and bowls made from narra that produced distinctive blue and yellow opalescent colors when water is poured into them (later known to Europeans as lignum nephriticum). During the Spanish colonial era, they were exported to Mexico as luxury goods for their purported diuretic properties via the Manila-Acapulco Galleons, and from there, to Europe. They were often presented as gifts to European nobility.

The Jesuit missionary and historian Juan José Delgado (1697–1755) describes the industry in the following:

History

Precolonial era

Legendary background According to the epic Maragtas, the Bicolandia was closely allied with the Kedatuan of Madja-as Confederation, which was located southeast on Panay Island. Two datus and their followers, who followed Datu Puti, arrived at Taal Lake, with one group later settling around Laguna de Bay, and another group pushing southward into the Bicol Peninsula, placing the Bicolanos between people from Luzon and people from the Visayas. An ancient tomb preserved among the Bicolanos, discovered and examined by anthropologists during the 1920s, refers to some of the same deities and personages mentioned in the Maragtas.G. Nye Steiger, H. Otley Beyer, Conrado Benitez, A History of the Orient, Oxford: 1929, Ginn and Company, p. 122. It is however worth noting that no other material written records remain that can accurately back the epic's narrative.Almeda, E. M. (1992). Archaeology and Bikol Pre-History. The Journal of History, 36-37(1-2).

Precolonial duluhan of Naga Prior to the arrival of the first Spanish conquistadors in what is now present day Naga City, the pre-colonial settlement of Naga was a regionally hegemonic polity geographically located on a strategic tributary, now known as the Naga River, flowing from Mount Isarog to the Bicol River.

According to historians William Henry Scott and Danilo Madrid Gerona, precolonial societies were referred to by the natives as duluhan, a broader socio-political structure than the purported familiality of the natives. In Naga and in the rest of Bicol during that period, the only known tripartite social classes derived from Visayan barangays were the maguino, the richest noble class addressed as Kagoangnan ("elder" in Bikol) that were only permitted to datoship; timagua, or timawa, the commoners that constituted the general population; and the oripon ("alipin" in Tagalog), a slave class composed of other subclasses, such as the guintubo (pandoan in plural).

Naga river and soil Naga's tributary was highly potable due to the prevalence of cascading springs from Mount Isarog, purifying the mountain's downstream. A rich ecosystem of flora and fauna sparsely inhabited within mangrove thickets were largely endemic to this district. From the igenous composition of Mount Isarog and within the vicinity of the Bicol River as the peninsular drainage basin, the soil of Naga was highly fertile, attesting to its natural wealth.

Territorial extent The extent of the settlement of Naga was contained on the tributary's eastern bank, adjacent to a highly dependent barangay that was Tabuc, now present day barangays Tabuco and Abella; the name derived from the Bikol word "taboc", a "cockfighting blade", due to the landform's resemblance. The Naga settlement is now roughly within the area where the present-day barangays of Lerma and Tinago are located.

Tabuco was highly instrumental in the development of Naga, simultaneously with the other vassal barangays in the riverine district paying tribute to Naga in gold and rice. Coupled with the tributary's choke point, these effectively made Naga a highly influential village in domestic inter-barangic politics.

Regional trade hegemony The settlement of Naga, attributed to its strategic location, was a major trading outpost, controlling traffic between the gold mining barangays of Paracale and Mambulao (now Jose Panganiban) and the rice cultivating district of Yraya, where pre-Hispanic Bato and Libon were located. The settlement's prowess in trading, not limited to domestic ties but to inter-maritime affairs, acquired Naga a comparatively advanced armament consisting of "iron corslets, greaves, wristlets, gauntlets, helmets, arquebuses, and culverins" from foreign Asian traders, evidently Chinese traders of the Ming dynasty from the Silk Road.

Economic affluence The fertile soil in Naga reflected the "export-scale" rice and abaca production, also harboring an abundance of hardwoods such as narra, yakal (Shorea astylosa), guijo (Shorea guiso), kamagong (Diospyros blancoi), and molave (Vitex parviflora). Popular regional livelihoods in the Naga district also included fishing, accompanied by the Bicol River's biodiversity of fish, mollusks, and crustaceans. Additionally, Naga once led a major regional metal industry that the Spanish came to soon propose of further territorial ambitions into the purported opulence of Los Camarines.

Spanish colonial period

Early discovery of Naga (1573–1579)

Salcedo's expedition

In July 1573, Governor-General Guido de Lavezaris ordered the first Spanish expedition into Southern Luzon. Led by conquistador Juan de Salcedo, they eventually landed in the settlement of Naga. Augustinian chronicler Fray Gaspar de San Agustin, detailed the number of the barangay's native buildings to be 3,000, beyond Libon's 800. Disputedly, as San Agustin infamously inflated statistics beyond proportion, it was indicated in his report that "in the river of Vicol and Camarines which capital was the village of Naga and had one hundred thousand armed men excluding laborers and merchants."

Reporting Naga's craftsmanship in metallurgy and affluence from maritime trading afforded the establishment of a garrison and Bicol's first Catholic mission base, now the San Francisco Parish Church, formerly made of wood and hay; on the western bank of Naga's river. Three months after Salcedo's return to Manila with his 800 taels (400 grams) of gold, his garrison stationed in Naga hoarded a total of 2,800 taels (140 kilograms) of gold from the riverine district.

Conquest of the Naga settlement In 1574, Doctor Francisco de Sande, in continuation of the archipelagic colonization, executed the military campaign to conquer the newly discovered polities in Southern Luzon. This military contingent was led by Salcedo's most prominent commanders: Captain Pedro de Chavez, Alferez Cristobal de Saldaña, Francisco Saavedra, and Esteban de Solis. Armed with hundreds of soldiers and native allied warriors, the overall contingent departed Manila southbound and initially engaged with the hostile villages of Mambulao and Paracale, then, upon further incursions down south, Baao, Bula, and Naga.

In Naga, the armed residents waged a fierce defensive battle on the settlement's river banks against the Spanish forces. Ultimately, despite the stubborn resistance, the natives succumbed to the Spanish; throughout the ordeal, the locals suffered substantial casualties. Upholding the warriors of the conquered barangay in profound esteem, Augustinian chronicler Fray Martin de Rada once said, In 1575, Captain Pedro de Chávez, the commander of the garrison left behind by Salcedo, founded on garrison grounds a temporary settlement."Jesuits In The Philippines (1581-1768)" Page 59 "These settlements were much smaller than Manila. In 1582 Manila had an adult male population of 300 Spaniards; Vigan, 60; Nueva Caceres, 30; Cebu, 70; Arevalo, 20. In 1586 Manila had 329 Spanish men and youths capable of bearing arms; the most recently established settlement, Nueva Segovia in Cagayan, had 97; Nueva Caceres, 69; Arevalo, 65; Cavite, 64; Cebu, 63; Villa Fernandina, 19. He christened the settlement after incumbent Gov.-Gen. Sande's hometown of Cáceres, Spain.

Naga encomenderos in service of the Crown

The Spanish administrative capital settled in Libon was transferred to the area of Naga due to its centrally strategic location administering the other newly erected encomiendas, rapidly populating the riverine district. By 1578, Christianization efforts were first spearheaded in the Camarines region by Franciscans Pablo de Jesus and Bartolome Ruiz in collaboration with the encomiendas through the system of reducción, embodied in the voluminious compendium of the Recopilacion de Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias (Laws of the Indies) urging for:

During the period of protracted pacification, the encomienda system was officially ratified in the region, supplanting the inter-barangic and hegemonic administrative order with Imperial rule.

The first wards incorporated in the encomienda system were Naga and Camaligan, assigned to encomendero Pedro Cid. The Crown appropriated the conquered lands to the highly decorated Spanish soldiers who participated in the incursions, enjoining them to a "threefold responsibility" of "(1) to maintain peace among the natives within the encomienda, (2) to support the missionaries, (3) to protect and defend the natives from any hostile elements."

In return, the encomenderos were formally authorized to exact a tribute of eight reales annually upon their male subjects, ranging from ages of nineteen to sixty. The former polities' chieftains had to regularly collect tributes from his residents, then forward the currency or commodity to the encomendero in charge, who typically resided in the administrative capital. A quarter of a ward's tribute was made taxable to royal coffers, simultaneously funding the clergy.

Establishment of the Villa de Nueva Cáceres (1579)

Founding of Villa de Cáceres