MANILA, Philippines - The road slashes through interminable sugarcane fields, in July grown tall and mature and ready for the cutter’s scythe, rolling away on both sides of the road to distances you can’t see.

Turning off the highway in Talisay City, you trek (if you’re up to it) or drive (if you don’t mind breaking an axle) through 3 km of dirt road pockmarked with treacherous stones and potholes; when it rains you could get stuck.

Is it worth this tortuous expedition, you keep asking yourself. Then at the end of the road, like a sudden apparition, like something out of a half-forgotten dream, The Ruins looms. It takes your breath away. And it takes a long time recovering it.

Even reduced to skeletal frame, the two-story mansion looks awesome. Of Italianate architecture, it is believed by experts to bear a very close resemblance to the façade of the Carnegie Hall in New York, and evokes ship captains’ homes in New England.

Neo-Romanesque columns supporting round arches and balustrades go round the lower and upper floors, giving the house a grandiosity unparalleled during its time.

A belvedere, facing west, a glassed-in gallery with bay windows, affords an unimpeded view of the glorious sunset.

The mansion is bathed in the golden glow of sunset, in a photograph by Raymund Heredia Javellana, who has been so taken by his magical inheritance, he has been doing some sprucing up and landscaping to turn it, hopefully, into a tourist attraction in Negros and, soon, into a café.

Javellana’s efforts will breathe new life into The Ruins, but never again will be recaptured the glory and magnificence of the mansion that had seen the passing of two eras and two generations.

Alien architecture

The mansion was built in the early 1900s by the sugar baron Don Mariano Ledesma Lacson (1865-1948) for his first wife Maria Braga, a Portuguese from Macau he met on one of his vacations in Hong Kong. Maria Braga’s father was a captain of a ship that sailed across Europe and Asia, and was believed to have influenced the house’s design, which was completely alien to the aesthetics of the period.

Maria’s father may have also brought into the house from his travels the furniture and chinaware reputed to be the finest ever seen at the time when many other big houses, particularly in Talisay and Silay, boasted the best furnishings sugar money could buy. The Lacson mansion, besides, was the largest residential structure then.

No photograph

Unfortunately, a photograph of the house’s interiors, other than the close-cropped group pictures of family and guests, has yet to be unearthed. “I’ve scoured the albums and memorabilia of my relative, but to no avail,” sighs Javellana.

But he has interesting anecdotes of his great-grandfather, Don Mariano Ledesma Lacson, the younger brother of Don Aniceto Lacson, the first revolutionary president of Negros, and of Maria Braga Lacson, who taught Spanish in Talisay and whose daughters remained unmarried in their devotion to the care of their younger siblings.

It was one of her daughters who maintained a beautiful garden of lilies, all imported, surrounding the four-tiered fountain on the mansion’s front lawn. One of her sons supervised the construction of the mansion, and “he made certain that the A-grade mixture of concrete and its pouring were precisely followed,” says Javellana. He loves asking his guests to palpate the walls and feel the marble-smooth finish. “It must be the egg whites that they mix in the cement for greater binding,” he says. (The womenfolk must have been feeding the construction workers a lot of leche flan prepared from all those discarded egg yolks!)

Inferno

The stonework of course was massive, impregnable to the inferno that engulfed the house in 1942. United States Armed Forces in the Far East (Usaffe) guerrilla fighters torched the mansion to prevent the Japanese imperial forces from using it. At first they ignited three drums of gasoline, but the gasoline flared up and out too fast and failed to burn the three-inch wooden floors. They then mixed three drums of used oil and a drum of gasoline and the fire lasted three days, devouring all the woodwork and bringing down the roof.

“It was a sad fate for the mansion,” mourns Javellana. “But then long before the fire it had already been abandoned, as all the children wanted to live in the city.” Who indeed would want to live in a castle in the middle of nowhere?

Javellana would not, although he might—if he had the millions and millions of pesos to restore it. But certainly, he says, the idea of rebuilding the mansion had not crossed the mind of his mother, Pacita Lopez Heredia, who won the 3.6-ha farmland, that included the 903-sq m structure, in a lottery held by the heirs when the vast plantation was partitioned among them.

Javellana had offered to donate the mansion to the priests to be turned into a retreat house, but the priests were intimidated by the mind-boggling cost of rebuilding it.

Rehabilitation

In 2006, after 20 years in the travel business, he was fired by the dream of transforming his family’s inheritance into a tourist attraction and café.

He rehabilitated the four-tiered fountain from which radiates four pathways, one leading to a canopied “gazebo.” The marvelously intact 2.5-meter entrance hallway, which used to separate the boys’ rooms on the right, now a little garden of palms and bromeliads, from the living and dining rooms on the left, now the café area, leads to a kitchen and a room-with-bath prettily done up by an interior decorator. And he had the grounds surrounding the mansion neatly landscaped, with the tall sugarcane stalks standing sentinel along the fringes of the mowed lawn. And with Pavarotti filling the hushed silence, The Ruins is pure classical romance.

Since The Ruins opened in January this year, it has become a favorite venue for wedding receptions, debuts and birthday parties—although the rains could dampen the merriment (Javellana is thinking of covering the gaping roof with glass panes).

As of now The Ruins serves only drinks and snacks, but soon it will serve wine, hot soups, tapas and the like, concocted by the Dutch chef and culinary magazine writer and editor Guido Nijssen, who is in Talisay City to teach food product development and culinary training.

Go visit The Ruins: There’s nothing like it in the whole Philippines. Really breathtaking. Just don’t forget to exhale.

Oh, by the way, there’s a more navigable road through a subdivision, after which The Ruins is just a few more meters away by the dirt road. Get directions at 0917-8326003.

What else to do in Negros

IF IT’S ADVENTURE YOU SEEK, and a trek of three kilometers to reach a castle in the middle of nowhere is a piece of cake to you, Negros Occidental abounds in more adventures to whet your high-risk taste.

Scuba diving. There are some 25 dive spots in Negros offering a variety of underwater sights and sites, including shipwrecks. Dive shops in seaside resorts offer adequate equipment for foreign and local scuba enthusiasts.

Cycling. Explore the mountains on wheels. Hook up with any of the 25 cycling clubs in the province. Negros has competition-class trails for both cross-country and downhill races.

Mountaineering. Negros is home to Mt. Kanlaon, the highest peak in Central Philippines, rising over 8,000 feet above sea level. Kanlaon boasts 40 km of foot trails, triple canopy forests, scenic cliffs, breathtaking waterfalls and magnificent caves that are among the best in the Philippines.

To know more about these adventures, the provincial government of Negros Occidental, through the Negros Occidental Tourism Center (Provincial Tourism Office), in partnership with Negros Island Tourism Inc., will be launching “Adventure Negros” at the Negros Trade Fair of the Association of Negros Producers at The Tent of Rockwell, Makati City, Sept. 30-Oct. 5.