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This rich and unique history makes a walk along its streets a time travel — a trip into the dark and hopeful past. Culion Island has always been isolated, a distant, hardly accessible paradise. But isolation found another meaning in 1904 when an Executive Order was issued to create a leper colony in Culion, shutting it from the rest of the world.
After 400 years of Spanish occupation, the revolt led by General Emilio Aguinaldo declared the independence of the Philippines on June 12, 1898, only to succumb to American occupation a short time later.
The history of Culion as a leper colony can be traced back to May 27, 1906, when Coast Guard cutters Polillo and Mindanao docked along the shore of Culion and carried 370 Hansenites (lepers) from Cebu.
Jan 25, 2016 · In 2014, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) unveiled a historical marker renaming the old hospital as Culion Sanitarium and General Hospital.
Mar 14, 2017 · A hundred years ago, it was a cruel and controversial measure to forcefully segregate people who tested positive for Mycobacterium leprae, the bacterium that causes leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease), an ancient and thoroughly mysterious infection.
Jun 19, 2022 · From 1914 to 1921, Culion was believed to be the largest leprosy colony in the world. In 1933, the number of lepers on the island was 7,000. The colony had two areas: one where most of the patients lived, and Balala, where the healthy personnel resided.
Aug 27, 2017 · Thousands were rounded up and exiled to the secluded island from different regions of the Philippines, the first few hundreds arriving in 1906. The colony ballooned to just short of 7,000 in 1933. It was only in 2006 that the island was declared leprosy-free by the World Health Organization.
