erdinand Magellan, a Portuguese working in the service of Spain, left Spain in 1519 intent on finding a route to the Spice Islands, today's Moluccas in Indonesia. He set off with five ships, though he soon lost two, and sailed around Cape Horn, eventu­ally reaching the Philippines. He and his men arrived off the coast of Samar on 16 March 1521. Their first landfall was on Homonhon, an island just south of Samar, and from here they sailed to Limasawa, and then to the trading port of Cebu, where they arrived on 7 April. The chief of Cebu, Rajah Humabon, was remarkably friendly, and within days Magellan had baptized him and many of his followers.

            Magellan then made a fatal mistake. Lapu-Lapu, chief of Mactan Island, which lies next to Cebu, was in a dispute with his neighbour Humabon, something that Magellan decided to settle with a fight. With the Europeans heavily outnumbered, their firearms proved insufficient to win the battle, and on 27 April Magellan was killed. Shortly after­wards many of his officers were massacred by Humabon's men, the survivors fleeing aboard their ships. Over a year later, 18 sur­vivors out of the original 265 returned to Spain. Today, Lapu­Lapu is hailed as the first Filipino to repulse foreign aggression.

Between 1523 and 1546 Spain sent three more expeditions, and by the 1 55 Os the islands had become known to the Spanish as Islas Filipinas, in honour of King Philip II of Spain. But it was not until 1565 and an expedition led by Miguel de Legaspi that Spain started to gain a hold on the Philippines. In that year Legaspi set up the first permanent Spanish settlement, in Cebu, though fears of an attack by the Portuguese soon led him to move to Panay