Rotting testament to Imelda’s folly
AONCE-luxurious palace where the Philippines’ shoe-loving former first lady Imelda Marcos hosted latenight dances is rotting away after the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan a year ago.
The Santo Niño Shrine and Heritage Museum in the city of Tacloban was erected in the late ’70s, in the dying days of Ferdinand Marcos’s two-decade dictatorship.
It was one of at least 29 presidential “rest houses” — it had 21 bedrooms — the couple built across the country and has long been derided by critics as a symbol of the family’s alleged thievery and decadence.
It was Imelda who came up with designs for the palatial building, claimed Vicky Eviota, a guide, during a recent tour of the crumbling mansion.
“It was Imelda’s idea. It was two years in the making.”
But the 2 000m² “shrine” — a spectacular if gaudy creation that even has a diorama charting Imelda’s rise to power and fortune — has fallen on hard times. Although it is packed with Ming Dynasty vases, intricate ivory carvings and rare hardwood chandeliers, the building smells like a damp garden shed.
An out-of-tune grand piano sits in a cavernous second-floor ballroom where Imelda and her husband entertained guests.
Several stained-glass windows were punched in by the typhoon on November 8 2013 and have yet to be put back.
The museum was struggling to keep up appearances even before Typhoon Haiyan, which brought the city of Tacloban to its knees and killed more than 7 000 people.
In 1986, just five years after completion, the palace was seized by the Presidential Commission on Good Government, which had been created to recover the Marcos’s ill-gotten gains after he was ousted in a revolution that year.
By tracking funds to Swiss bank accounts, renting and selling his extensive property portfolio and finding his art collection, which included works by Picasso and Monet, the commission claims to have recovered $4-billion (about R45billion) that Marcos, who died in 1989, allegedly pilfered.
But with endless legal battles preventing authorities from selling the Tacloban palace, it has been left to rot.
In 2011, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported: “Termites have gnawed portions of the walls and ceiling. When it rains, the roof leaks. Some decorative tiles are falling off walls and ceilings, bulbs on a chandelier are busted, a mirror is cracked and a lyre on display has broken strings.”
Before the typhoon struck, about 3 000 people a month reportedly visited the museum, but Haiyan left the region’s tourist industry in tatters.
Guides at the largely visitorless museum now spend large chunks of each day sitting in darkness to try to cut its electricity bill. The 200 peso (about R50) admission fee has failed to stop the rot: “There is no funding,” complained Eviota
Asked whether she knew the former first lady, the guide immediately said: “Imelda Marcos: she is beautiful — not only nice.” — ©