MANDAUE CITY, Cebu – A more vibrant Casa Gorordo Museum will reopen on Saturday, October 15, 2022.
Heritage lovers and other visitors will get to enjoy the casa’s new look and its new displays that is expected to give visitors a better experience.
The house museum located along E. Aboitiz Street in Cebu City was closed in 2020 due to pandemic restrictions. This National Historical Landmark and a favorite stop in Cebu’s cultural circuit was given a facelift ahead of its reopening to give visitors something to look forward to.
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From having a dark brown exterior, it now has “a more vivid ochre and green façade, the outcome of months of research into the culture and lifestyle of the Filipinos, particularly the Cebuanos, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” Ramon Aboitiz Foundation, Inc. (RAFI) said in a statement.
“The repainting project is a thoughtfully-designed undertaking reaching back to the Spanish colonial period when the homes of affluent Cebuanos – two-storey stone and wood dwellings now known as ‘balay nga tisa’ – stood out in resplendent color. The project was undertaken to reclaim the structure’s former aesthetic to better enable fulfillment of its mission to be a “guide to the world that shaped Cebuano cultural identity” part of the statement read.
The house museum was built in the mid-1800s and acquired by the Spanish merchant Juan Isidro de Gorordo in 1863.
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Four generations of the family lived in the house, including Cebu’s first Filipino bishop, Juan Gorordo before it was acquired by RAFI in 1980. The museum was opened in 1983, meaning it will be turning 40 next year.
As a preparation for its reopening, RAFI formed a committee tasked to decide on the curatorial justifications and aesthetic output of the facelift project. Inputs were provided by Arch. Michael Manalo, Casa Gorordo Museum’s consultant on architectural conservation.
Manalo is also Head of the Cultural Heritage Subcommittee of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and Chairman of the Committee on Culture of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) National Cultural Commission.
Florencio Moreño II, Officer-in-Charge of the RAFI Culture and Heritage Unit, said the choice for the museum’s color palette was consistent with the aesthetic of the colonial period, the house being the residence of a bishop.
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Moreño also shares that the museum experience has been redesigned with technological enhancements and new displays.
“Continuous research has allowed us to expand the body of knowledge about the prevailing norms of society and the lifestyles of Cebuano families of those days. This robust experience of our shared heritage is something that visitors to Casa Gorordo will definitely appreciate,” he said.
After its formal reopening, the museum will accommodate guests from Mondays to Saturdays from 9 am to 5 pm. Regular app-guided tours are offered for a P100 fee per person. A special guided tour is also available to groups of five or more for P150 per person.
Senior citizens, students and persons with disabilities will only be charged P50 during regular app-guided tours.
/bmjo
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