Panguil Bay Bridge: Tangub to Tubod in Seven Minutes

For as long as anyone in Tangub can remember, Lanao del Norte was right there across the bay and a whole afternoon away. You could see Tubod from the shore. Getting to it meant driving around the head of Panguil Bay, or queuing for the ferry, waiting, crossing, and queuing again. Two and a half hours on a good day.

On 27 September 2024 the Panguil Bay Bridge opened and the crossing became seven minutes.

The bridge

It runs 3.77 kilometres from Tangub City in Misamis Occidental to Tubod in Lanao del Norte, which makes it the longest bridge over water in Mindanao. It is a cable-stayed design, the kind with tall towers and fans of cables, so it reads from a distance as two white masts standing in the bay. Construction started in February 2020 and finished in four years, through the pandemic, at a cost of around eight billion pesos, with financing from Korea's Economic Development Cooperation Fund.

Every kind of vehicle can use it except trucks over 30 tonnes. There is no ferry schedule to plan around any more and no port to wait at.

What it changed

The bridge did something bigger than shave a commute. It joined two provinces that had been neighbours on the map and strangers in practice. Ozamiz and Tangub are now a short drive from Tubod, Iligan is reachable in a morning instead of a day, and traffic that used to bypass Misamis Occidental on the way to Zamboanga now comes through it.

For the province that has meant a lot of new faces. Day visitors from Lanao come across for the Hoyohoy Highland zipline and the Festival of Lights in December. Businesses along the Tangub waterfront and the highway into Ozamiz are seeing customers who could not have made the trip before. It is the single biggest reason the province is being described as a rising destination rather than a place you pass through.

Where to see it from

Driving across it is the obvious answer, and worth doing once just for the view down the bay. For the photograph, the Tangub side gives the better angle. The waterfront and the boulevard area of Tangub City look straight out at the towers, and at dusk the bridge lights come on against the last of the sky. During the Festival of Lights in December the whole waterfront is lit and the bridge sits behind it.

From above, the ridge at Hoyohoy looks down over Panguil Bay and the bridge is a thin line across it, with Tubod on the far shore. That is the view that explains why the crossing mattered.

Getting to Tangub

Tangub City is about half an hour south of Ozamiz City along the coast road. Buses and vans run all day between the two, and from Tangub the bridge approach is signposted. Coming from Lanao del Norte, you are already on it.

Around the bridge

Tangub is a small city with a lot going on for its size. The Hoyohoy Highland Stone Chapel Adventure Park sits 850 metres up on the ridge behind it. The Festival of Lights turns the city into a month-long display every December. And the seafood is what you would expect from a town with the bay on its doorstep.

Places to eat, stay and shop in Tangub and the rest of the province are on our local business directory. If you run one of them, get your business listed and be found by the people now driving in across the bridge.