For today’s blog post on Iloilo City tourism and heritage spots, I present to you the Mejica Mansion. It is located in Baluarte, Molo, fronting the Baluarte Elementary School. We were able to visit the mansion as part of our tourist and heritage spots assessment here in Iloilo City. That is for the preparation of the Iloilo City Tourism and Development Plan. 

For a quick background, Mejica Mansion is the ‘balay na bato’ printing museum and was a repository of pre-war Ilonggo documents. It housed the famous Makinaugalingon press which printed books, commercial calendars, pamphlets and even dance tickets in its years of production. The founder was Don Rosendo Madrazo Mejica (1873-1956), a politician-philanthropist celebrated for establishing the Baluarte Elementary School in 1902, and serving as town councilor for nearly three decades.

Beside the mansion is the current Makinaugalingon press location and Mejica’s Makinaugalingon was the first ever newspaper in Iloilo to use the local language Hiligaynon. The first ever Hiligaynon copies of Rizal’s Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo was their product.

The tour party scheduled the visit around 3:00 in the afternoon and we were to go around inside, checking the old printing machines that they used and a huge cabinets of Makinaugalingon newspaper and their other journal collection. I think I saw a published copy as early as the 1930s. They also had a lot of memorabilia of the Don Rosendo Madrazo Mejica and other historical documents.

Check out below the pictures that I took during the course of the visit.