During the Christmas holidays, I took advantage of the relatively traffic-free streets to venture on a 2-hour or so drive out to Taal, Batangas after hearing a lot of positive feedback about this relatively unknown place. The word “Taal” by itself is quite well-known mainly because of its namesake volcano but it is also the name of a town nearby. There were two things at the top of my mind that I wanted to see, the first being the Basilica of St. Martin of Tours, said to be the largest church in Asia. The second was the Villavicencio House, one of Taal’s numerous ancestral mansions, and one which I discovered through an old issue of Cebu Pacific’s Smile Magazine.
welcome to taal!
The night before the trip, I scrambled to research more about the town, and to my surprise, there was actually a long list of sights to see there. There are no less than 8 historical-mansions-turned-museums in the quaint old town of Taal. There is of course the Basilica, and there are a couple of other religious sites which can easily take up a full day’s worth of sightseeing. I left my home in Metropolitan Manila at about 7 in the morning, and managed to arrive in Taal around two and a half hours later.
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