Thank you for visiting Catanduanes Island. In order to serve you better in the future, please answer the following questions:
- On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you?
- Catanduanes Island is best known for its:
- a) Wines
- b) Cheeses
- c) Abacá
- d) Happiness
- e) None of the above
If you answered abacá to the second question, you’re right.
If you answered happiness, it is likely that you have been influenced by possibly the island’s best known web designer and social media influencer, Karlo Adrianne Rodriguez Aguilar.
The slogan “Happy Island” is a registered trademark owned by Aguilar and certified by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines. It first appeared on November 3, 2013.
Aguilar is a purveyor of t-shirts and other Happy Island merch – “merch” is a relatively new word for “merchandise” that is sold specifically to promote a brand name — through his GoCatanduanes website and a mobile app.
The Catanduanes Provincial Government and its tourism office have embraced Aguilar’s “Happy Island” slogan to promote the province as a tourism destination — successfully, it should be added.
According to the Provincial Tourism Office, tourism numbers are growing hand over fist.
From 2022 to 2023, tourist arrivals grew by 7 percent, from 119,710 to 127,619, including 1,431 foreign visitors. (Catanduanes Tribune, Jan. 17, 2024. Figures for 2024 were not available on the tourism office’s websites.)
However, in fact there are no data proving that Catandunganons are happier than residents of other islands in the Philippines. On the contrary, there are ample data supporting another of the island’s nicknames — “Land of the Howling Winds”, a pejorative dating back to the mid-20th century.
Happiness was in short supply after the unspeakable devastation caused by Super Typhoon Rolly in November 2020. Known locally as Super Typhoon Goni, it packed gusts of 315 kilometers per hour and destroyed 65 percent of homes, leaving 10,000 families homeless and causing PHP400 million in losses to the abacá industry and another PHP150 million in losses of food crops – rice, corn, coconuts and more.
Indeed, it has been reported that Aguilar’s slogan was a deliberate attempt to counter the negative impression conveyed by the older slogan.
Before “Happy Island”, the province was widely known as the “Abacá Capital of the Philippines” — or sometimes even as the “Abacá Capital of the World” — and rightly so.
But there is another island far away that has “happy” in its slogan – Aruba, an island country in the Caribbean Sea whose slogan is “One Happy Island”.
In the Philippines, there are other islands with promotional slogans: Bohol, “Heart of the Islands”; Cebu, “Where the Heart Sings”; Siargo, “Surfing Capital of the Philippines”; Palawan, “The Last Frontier”; and Boracay, “Island Paradise of the Philippines”.
Catanduanes’ chief advantage over other islands is that it is less crowded and not overrun by foreign visitors like Boracay, which had 412,803 foreign visitors in 2024, according to the local tourism office.
Switching gears for a moment, it should be said that Filipinos in general are known internationally for their innate resilience, happiness, and friendly, outgoing manner.
According to Business Mirror, a daily newspaper in Manila, these traits are rooted in Filipinos’ strong sense of community, faith and appreciation for simple pleasures such as family gatherings and shared meals.
In a word, Filipinos have kapwa, which is difficult for Westerners to comprehend because the supply of kapwa in the West is limited. So, if Catanduganons are happy, it’s probably because they are Filipinos first.
If there were an international contest for cheekiest slogan, the winner would probably be this one from Australia: “CU in the NT”, for “See you in the Northern Territories”, launched with some controversy in 2016.
Australians might not score high on the global happiness index, but they do score high on humor, especially when they have a couple of pints under their belts.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA.