The Festivity of Flowers
Panagbenga Festival is annual event that showcases Baguio City as a home of abounding flower depots and cultural traditions. This month-long festival held every February usually concludes on a weekend of grand floral parade and fireworks display. The term is of Malayo-Polynesian origin, meaning "season of blooming".
It was founded as a tribute to the city's flowers and as a way to rise up from the devastation of the 1990 Luzon earthquake. It includes floats that are decorated with flowers unlike those used in Pasadena's Rose Parade. The festival also includes street dancing, presented by dancers clad in flower-inspired costumes, that is inspired by the Bendian, an Ibaloi dance of celebration that came from the Cordillera region. Visit an online Flowers Philippines site to learn how to buy and send flowers back to the Philippines.
Aside from economic boosts from tourism, the festival also helped the younger generation of indigenous people to rediscover their culture's old traditions. The indigenous people was first wary with government-led tourism because of the threat that they will interfere or change their communities' rituals.
The Panagbenga Festival, formerly as the Baguio Flower Festival, was formed in 1995 as the brainchild of Attorney Damaso Bangaoet Jr. of the John Hay Poro Point Development Corporation (JPDC) and Victor A. Lim of the Bases Conversion Development Authority (BCDA). Learn how to conveniently send some flowers back to the Philippines by visiting an online Flowers Philippines site.
Entries from the annual Camp John Hay art contest gave its official logo: a spray of sunflowers. The festival was set in February to boost tourism as it was considered as a month of inactivity between the busy days of Christmas season and the Holy Week and the summer season.
In 1996, archivist and curator Ike Picpican suggested that the festival be renamed as Panagbenga, a Kankanaey term that means "a season of blossoming, a time for flowering".
In 2007, Members of the Team Unity and other candidates from the opposition gave their political campaign in the festival. All the candidates broke the festival's guidelines by handing out campaign materials. Some tourists were displeased of their presence as people that wanted to take pictures with the candidates spilled over the streets and disrupted the parade. To learn more about flowers and their meaning, then visit an online Flowers Philippines site.
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