Tangub City Charter Day in the Philippines Date in the current year: February 28, 2024

The City of Tangub is a component city in the Philippine province of Misamis Occidental. A “component city” means that it is not independent and is governed as part of the province in which it is located.

Like many cities and municipalities on the island of Mindanao, Tangub originated as a settlement of the Subanen people, who began to settle in the Zamboanga Peninsula during the Neolithic era. The name Tangub derives from the Subanen word tangkub, a local name for a rice basket made from tree bark and rattan strips.

According to local legend, the city got its name due to an encounter between Spanish soldiers and locals. A group of lost soldiers stumbled upon a Subanen couple and asked what the name of the place was. The couple did not understand Spanish and replied, “Tangkub”, thinking they were asked about the rice baskets they were carrying.

Another version of Tangub’s name origin story tells about a Spanish soldier who found a dead man while patrolling the area. The Subanens tried to explain that he was bitten by a snake that hid in his tangkub, but the soldier misunderstood and reported that the dead man was from a place called Tangkub.

Tangub became a thriving settlement around the late 19th century, when it saw an influx of migrants, and a group of community leaders calling themselves the “Aspiration Committee” started a movement to ltransform the town into an independent municipality. The transformation, however, didn’t occur until the defeat of the Philippines in the Philippine-American war and the establishment of the Insular Government under the United States Department of War.

Governor-General Dwight Davis designated Tangub as a municipality on December 4, 1929 and renamed it Regidor in honor of Antonio Maria Regidor, a Philippine lawyer who played an important role the secularization movement in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era. In this process, Tangub was split from its mother municipality of Misamis (now Ozamiz). Regidor also included all the neighborhoods (barrios) of what is now the municipality of Bonifacio.

The municipality of Regidor regained its original name in 1930, and Bonifacio split from it in 1942. Tangub was finally chartered as a city on June 17, 1967, becoming the 50th chartered city in the Philippines. It was formally inaugurated on February 28, 1968.

The annual celebration of Tangub’s cityhood is an eleven-day-long festival that starts on February 18 and culminates on February 28, Tangub City Charter Day. The citywide celebration is filled with colorful public parades, performances, dance festivals, competitions, and other festive events and activities. One of the highlights of the celebration is Intercollegiate Games, a friendly athletic competition between Governor Alfonso D. Tan College (GADTC) and the Northwestern Mindanao State College of Science and Technology (NMSCST).