Boac, Marinduque

Situated in the western coast of Marinduque island, the municipality is bordered in the north by the municipality of Mogpog, in the west by the Tayabas Bay and Sibuyan Sea, in the east by the municipality of Torrijos, and in the south by the municipalities of Gasan and Buenavista. Boac, a heritage town in its own right, is known as one of the main venues of the annual Moriones Festival and is the location of a number of historical sites in Marinduque including the Boac Cathedral fortress church, Casa Real and the Liwasan ng Kalayaan, Laylay Port, and the Battle of Paye site. The municipality is also home to the Marinduque Branch of the National Museum of the Philippines. The toponym Boac is derived from the Cebuano word bu-ak, cognatic to the Tagalog word bi-ak and the southern Tagalog term ba-ak. This is in reference to the town being bisected by the Boac River which runs from the Central Marinduque and Balagbag Mountain Ranges to the west coast facing the Tayabas Bay. Other references suggest that the name Boac is derived from the Tagalog term bulwak referring to the gush of water at the estuaries and mouth of the Boac River. During the Spanish colonization, the first visita called Montserrat de Marinduque was established in the island in 1580 in what is now Boac. In the early years of Spanish colonization in Marinduque, it was first mentioned in Miguel de Loarca's Relacion de las Yslas Filipinas (1582-1583) that the natives of the island are Pintados or tattooed people resembling those from the Camarines Provinces and the Visayan Islands.