COUNTRY Formal Name:                 Republic of the Philippines (Republika ng Pilipinas).                   Short Form: Philippines (Pilipinas). Term for Citizen(s): Filipino(s). Capital: Manila






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  Located on Luzon Island, Metropolitan Manila, including the adjacent Quezon City and surrounding suburbs, is the largest city in the Philippines, with about 12 million people, or nearly 14 percent of the total population. 

  Other large cities include Cebu City on Cebu Island and Davao City on Mindanao Island. Independence: 

  The Philippines attained independence from Spain on June 12, 1898, and from the United States on July 4, 1946.

   Flag: The flag of the Philippines has two equal horizontal bands of blue Click to Enlarge Image(top) and red with a white equilateral triangle based on the hoist side; in the center of the triangle is a yellow sun with eight primary rays (each containing three individual rays), and in each corner of the triangle is a small yellow five-pointed star.

  HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 

  Early History: The Philippine archipelago was settled at least 30,000 years ago, when migrations from the Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere are believed to have occurred. Additional migrations took place over the next millennia. 

 Over time, social and political organization developed and evolved in the widely scattered islands. The basic unit of settlement was the barangay (a Malay word for boat that came to be used to denote a communal settlement). Kinship groups were led by a datu (chief), and within the barangay there were broad



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GEOGRAPHY 

 Location: 

 The Philippines comprises an archipelago of some 7,107 islands located off Southeast Asia, between the South China Sea on the west and the Philippine Sea on the east. The major islands are Luzon in the north, the Visayan Islands in the middle, and Mindanao in the south. 

 Size:

 The total area is about 300,000 square kilometers, including about 298,000 square kilometers of land and about 2,000 square kilometers of water. The Philippines stretches about 1,850 kilometers from Y’Ami Island in the north to Sibutu Island in the south and is about 1,000 kilometers at its widest point east to west. The bulk of the population lives on 11 of the 7,107 islands.