Central Palawan's quiet port — Japanese Garden Island, Malampaya Sound, and the gateway to Palawan's forgotten middle
Roxas is the capital of Roxas municipality in central Palawan — a small port town on the coast road between Puerto Princesa and El Nido that most travellers pass through without stopping, which makes it one of Palawan's most genuinely local towns. The Japanese Garden Island (officially Coco-Loco Island) just offshore is a resort with snorkelling reefs around low coral formations. To the north, Malampaya Sound is a large protected natural gas field and marine area where dugongs, sea turtles, and saltwater crocodiles inhabit a vast mangrove estuary system rarely visited by tourists. Roxas has a…
Roxas municipality was one of the resettlement targets of the Marcos-era land reform and migration programmes of the 1960s–70s, which brought Visayan and Ilocano farmers to Palawan's interior. The town itself sits at the edge of the Palawan peninsula's most geologically complex stretch — the limestone karst of the north meets the sedimentary basin of the south here, which is why Malampaya Sound to the north holds one of the Philippines' largest natural gas fields (the Malampaya deepwater gas-to-power project, a $4.5bn development, supplies about 30% of Luzon's power demand). The gas field is…