Abolish the abominable Intramuros golf course

Malacañang Palace announced recently that the Mansion House in Baguio City is now open to the public as a presidential museum. The reason for the opening, officials said, is because they’ve noticed that up to 2,000 tourists take pictures outside the gates, so they’re opening the doors for people to enter, visit, and take pictures inside the sprawling presidential vacation house.

The opening of the president’s summer house to the public is long overdue. For all the public money spent for its expensive upkeep, it’s hardly ever used. We’ve not heard of any president in recent memory who has spent more than a couple of days using it, in his/her entire six years term. Let the people use and enjoy it instead. Kudos to the Marcos administration for taking the initiative.

While the current government is in the correct frame of mind of giving people’s access to treasured and scarce public grounds, its attention should be called to an even worthier cause in this regard. It involves a huge public space, in the most prized location of our nation’s capital, and very near Malacañan Palace. It’s a premium piece of public space located in the most storied location of our country’s history. Horrendously, it is off limits to the toiling masses, because it’s obscenely reserved for the exclusive use of the rich. This is none other than the Intramuros golf course which is like a giant barnacle abhorrently attached to the walled city.

The golf course is a complete abomination, by its very existence. It occupies 23 hectares in a mega-metropolis of 21 million people that has a severe shortage of public space. While millions of ordinary people in Metro Manila have no access to public parks, here is a vast space of public land maintained by the government for the exclusive enjoyment of the rich. What public service is the government dispensing by maintaining an exclusive playground for the wealthy?

I remember reading in the past about a historian who was wondering about the loss of a big chunk of public space, of which Luneta Park was a mere part, that used to be devoted to the outdoor needs of our ancestors during the Spanish occupation. The golf course provides a big piece of the puzzle. The lamented loss of a big outdoor space has been ignominiously appropriated to make way for the Intramuros golf course.

I also remember reading in the past that the government justification in operating the golf course is to give ordinary people the chance to experience the sports of golf. What an utter and brazen hogwash. It’s like the government justifying its operations of a steakhouse in order to give ordinary people the chance to eat steak.

The golf course is not only occupying public space devoted exclusively for the rich. Even worse and more deplorable, its operations are subsidized by public money. The golf course has been operating at a consistent loss that averages at P27 million per year from 2015 to 2019, according to publicly available financial statements. This means that the people have been subsidizing this rich man’s past time. The golf course is a huge waste of precious space, shamelessly serving as a subsidized playground for the rich.

Prior to its transformation as a golf course, the wide space outside the walled city used to be a moat (a deep and wide trench filled with water intended as a defense against attacks on Intramuros). Then the moat was covered with landfill and transformed into a sunken garden. Subsequently, however, it was turned into a golf course during the American occupation.

It would be easy for the government to look at models in other foreign cities on how to transform the golf course into a beautiful space that would maximize its use for ordinary people. The El Retiro Park and Royal Botanic Gardens in Madrid, Spain, are two beautiful models that the government should look at. The golf course space can supplement the completely concrete grounds of the Luneta Park, because it can provide a grass park with lots of flowering plant islands, where people can go on picnics. Native flowering trees can be planted so that when they bloom, they will be a sight to behold like the cherry blossoms of Japan.

The space can have jogging or strolling areas shaded with endemic trees, and the trees can doubly function as teaching tools for students. It can have areas for football, baseball, volleyball, kite-flying, children’s playground, benches lounging, and an amphitheater for performances. The area can also be used to complement the limited space inside the walled city, in order to transform Intramuros into the kind of historical theme park that I wrote about previously (“Make Intramuros a living history museum,” 1/25/24).

If the Marcos administration is looking at a cultural legacy to leave behind indelibly, banish the relic of aristocratic privilege that the Intramuros golf course represents, and transform the space into plenty of uses beneficial to millions of ordinary folks.

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