SANTIAGO NOW A CITY

A lush plain at the northern gateway to Isabela announces the entry to Region 2's most vibrant, most talked-about, and most exciting premier city. At its southern entrance, a picturesque view of rice fields expanding against a burgeoning metropolitan backdrop of buildings and housing subdivisions greets the eye with a rousing welcome that sings again and again here at its eastern and western passages the rhapsodies of a booming economy: spouting commercial clusters, huge and imposing grain stations, and people happily going about the path to fulfillment.

Santiago City stands today as the major showcase and effective catalyst for change in Region 2. This present-day urban glory began to achieve prominence and was called El Pueblo de Carig in the 16th century while it was but a simple barrio in Camarag or Echague today. During the early period of Spanish conquest and christianization, this pueblo served as a strategic outpost from where was set forth all and every risky passage to Spanish missions, garrisons, and settlements that then lay upper-north in Cagayan Valley. In a short time, its bountiful and hospitable character revealed itself to those missionaries and soldiers, plantation owners and farmers, traders, civil government officials and clerks, and fortune-seekers from near and far regions who had the good fortune of seeing and knowing the place. Most of them fell so in love with the pueblo of three mountains and four rivers that they settled devotedly in.

For 397 years now, the City's commanding location has been serving as an advantageous means towards the attainment of religious, governmental, commercial, and settlement goals. With her new status as a city, this beautiful heiress to the venerable and exalted name of St. James, the Apostle-Warrior, promises to be hospitable more than she has ever been with her riches, opportunities, and pre-eminence to all her faithful inhabitants, so they can fulfill with her their destiny in community life all throughout the 21st century and beyond.