Kalibo on Panay honours the Santo Niño with the festival often called the mother of all Philippine festivals — drumbeats, the dragging sadsad dance step, body paint and towering tribal-style costumes filling the streets for several days in January.

To imitate the Ati

Ati-Atihan means “to imitate the Ati people”. The festival, held in several towns of Aklan on the island of Panay, is at its largest in Kalibo, the provincial capital. It combines religious processions with street parades of themed floats, dance groups in colourful costumes, marching bands and people with painted faces and bodies. The parade is called sadsad, like the local way of dancing in which the foot is briefly dragged along the ground to the beat of the bands. Believed to be the oldest festival in the Philippines and an inspiration for Sinulog and Dinagyang, it is known as the “mother of all Philippine festivals”.

The festival opens with a formal mass followed by a procession with drumming and dancing. The second day begins at dawn with a rosary procession. On the third Sunday of January, groups representing different “tribes” compete, and the festival ends with a procession of thousands of people carrying images of the Santo Niño.

Contested origins

A popular story links the festival to the Maragtas epic, in which ten Malay chieftains fleeing Borneo bought land on Panay from the Ati people, who later came down from the mountains in a famine and danced in gratitude for the food they were given — but modern historians question the epic, and the link to the Ati is considered a modern addition, like the festival’s name, adopted in 1972. The Fiesta de Santo Niño dates back at least to the seventeenth century, and from the 1950s the celebration took on carnival-like street dancing and body painting. The practice of darkening faces and bodies remains a subject of debate.