CAMBUHAWE

Cambuhawe is a hilly barangay that is located northwest of Balamban. It has only a total land area of 277 hectares. It is bounded by Pondol, Cansomoroy, Prenza, Cantu-od, Sto. Niño – Sta. Cruz, & Aliwanay.

It is politically subdivided into six (6) sitios, namely: Sam-ang, Lacdon, Centro, Poso Site, Plan Housing, and Mangga.¹

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BARANGAY

According to the late Romulus Gerali Cabahug, the past town’s historian, oral tradition pointed to a pre-Hispanic settlement on the coastline of what is now the town of Balamban. The place was referred to by natives as Kangma, which they thought to mean as dry land or dry place.

These early settlers of Kangma were thought to have originated from Java, Sumatra, and Malaya (present day Malaysia), who left their homeland to escape the armed conflicts resulting from power struggles among the nobility. They settled in the place which used to be called Buhawe, now to modern Balamban residents as Cambuhawe, after the place was hit by a cyclone known locally as “buhawe”.² “Buhawe” in Visayan means waterspout or cyclone. It forms in the sea, taking on the structure of a huge, dark funnel, and wherever it lands, it gauges out a deep hole on earth. Presumably this was happened to the place. The force of the waterspout must have caused the spring water to rush up to the surface. According to the accounts, the village or balangay of Buhawe was the first settlement in Balamban. Probably the settlers chose it because of the proximity of the spring.

But looking on ancient perspective, the oldest place having the name Kangma is one of the counties in Tibet which shares a border with Bhutan. The place is a mountainous county rich in fine horses hence the place is called Kangma which means in Tibetan as “healthy horses”. In ancient times and even until now the said place suffered civil war due to political conflicts. The entire country Tibet had also suffered an armed struggle against the Ming dynasty of China especially at the latter part of the 16^th century A.D. and an internal religious conflicts resulting to civil wars between theocratic nobles.³ 

Considering this fact the ancient settlers of Cambuhawe might not be coming from the south but from the north, i.e. from Tibet. Probably the Tibetans were the real importers of the ancient horses used in Balamban for their two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage known locally as “tartanilla” or “parada”. Tibetan word for waggon is sin-rta, literally means “wooden horse”. “Parada” might also be a Tibetan word which could be spelled in Tibetan as “pa rta” with the same pronunciation as “parada” which could be coined from “kha lo pa rta” which means literally as “horse-driven”.  While “tartanilla” is a Spanish word which means “a small Tartan”. The Tibetans were also descendants of the Tartans also known as Tatars or Mongols. Tibetan Buddhist monks were known to be fond of choosing caves as meditation rooms in calling Buddha and Kuan-yin, the goddess of wisdom and mercy. From this point of view the Tibetan settlers might had chosen Cambuhawe for its cave with running freshwater which was very appropriate for the worship of Kuan-yin who might be one and the same with the local worshipped goddess known as “T’ang An” (a name which was also a variant of Kuan-yin being the goddess of the moon, proof to this “chang o” or “chang an” which originally referred to the crescent moon was borrowed into the local dialect as “tango” which means “tusk” from the shape of the crescent moon similar to the tusk and “tang-an” which means “a person having tusk or a very well-known person full of wisdom”). And if this theory might be true, the said Tibetans might be from Kham, one of the three provinces that composed Tibet. They might be responsible in naming the place as Khambuhawe which might mean in Tibetan as “a frontier or a peripheral area to a place hit by a cyclone” which was later on spelled as “Cambuhawe”.

One of the sitios of Cambuhawe is Sitio Sam-ang, a word meaning “cemetery”. The word points to a much earlier time, which predated the common Cebuano term “kalubngan”. Still, radio announcers and writers of Classic Visayan prefer to use “sam-ang” instead of the latter word.

In the adjacent town of Asturias, there is a four-hectare pre-Hispanic cemetery known to the locals as “kalagatan”. But in Jovio Abellana’s dance-epic “Aginid Bayok sa Atong Tawarik,” he refers to cemetery as “kalagatang sam-ang.” The word for cemetery must then have been a compound word, which has reached us down through the centuries as a sundered phrase which has managed to retain its meaning.

Cabahug avered that in Sitio Sam-ang, human bones were dug up which were larger than those of modern man. Several archaeologists, notably one from the National Museum of the country, came to the place in 1959, and left with some of the bones to be studied by the experts in Manila. The natives of the town strongly maintain that these bones, and Sitio Sam-ang itself, would confirm the belief that the settlers of Kangma were the pre-Hispanic Malays (or more probably Tibetans), their ancestors.⁴

In 1903 during the American regime when there was a re-organization of all towns in the country oral tradition pointed out that the sitios of Cambuhawe were distributed to Pondol, Prenza, and Aliwanay. Cambuhawe by then was dissolved and ceased to exist as a barrio until in 1943 when its sitios were returned back during the implementation of the Barrio Charter and was fully established as a barangay again under Republic Act 3590.

In 1943, during World War II, almost a year before the Japanese occupied Balamban, the Americans had built a camp opposite the Cambuhawe Spring in preparation of the possible attack of the invading enemy. At present the said spring is developed into a natural swimming pool while the natural pool uphill down to Cambuhawe Cave is closed to the public for safety reason. The Cambuhawe Spring itself and the entire sitio where it is located is disputed by Pondol as still part of its jurisdiction an issue which is still to be resolved at present.¹

In 1956, the Essel Company under the supervision of Engr. Emmanuel Harder found a deposit of uranium and rock phosphate in the hills of Cambuhawe particularly in Sitio Libon-Tubig (which is now part of Sitio Mangga), where five tunnels were dug for that matter. The said company operated there for more than a year. After the Essel Company ceased its operations, the Benguet Mining Corporation took over the exploration of uranium and rock phosphate in 1958. At present nothing more is heard about the uranium and rock phosphate explorations. Instead, people would often visit the sitio for pilgrimage at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima.⁵

On June 19, 1960, Republic Act 2900 was enacted without the Executive approval creating “the sitio of Kambuhawi in the Municipality of Balamban, Province of Cebu” into a barrio.⁶ Yet Cambuhawe prior to that was already a barrio. Most probably the sitio referred to in that act was only one of the then sitios of Cambuhawe and the one referred to as “sitio Kambuhawi” was the original Cambuhawe Proper before which might be located in the vicinity of the Cambuhawe Spring. And its move for separation into a barrio probably did not prosper.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Recently in Sitio Lacdon, the Gaisanos had opened a new branch named as “Gaisano Balamban Towncenter”.¹