Qualla: Calauit Safari Park

Calauit Safari Park: Introduction

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paulo Ordoveza, CC BY 2.0. In May 1976, at a United Nations trade conference in Nairobi, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos handed an Englishman named Tony Parkinson a briefcase full of money. The assignment: collect large African mammals and ship them to a remote island in the Philippines. Within a year, fifteen reticulated giraffes, fifteen Grevy's zebras, and dozens of antelope species were sailing across the Indian Ocean aboard the M/V Salvador, bound for Calauit Island -- a 3,700-hectare sliver of land in the Calamian Archipelago off Palawan. The park that resulted is one of the strangest wildlife stories in Southeast Asia, a place where the cruelty of authoritarian power and the resilience of both animals and people produced something no one planned.

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Image: Paulo Ordoveza | CC BY 2.0

Calauit Safari Park: The People Who Were Moved

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jordan Balintac, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before the giraffes arrived, Calauit Island was home to an estimated 254 families, most of them members of the Tagbanwa, an indigenous people who had lived in the Calamian Islands for centuries. Under Marcos's martial law regime, these families were evicted and relocated to Halse...

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Image: Jordan Balintac | CC BY-SA 4.0

Calauit Safari Park: African Survivors on a Philippine Shore

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jordan Balintac, CC BY-SA 4.0. The African animals arrived in 1977 and, against all expectations, many of them thrived. Without natural predators, the population grew to 201 within five years, with 143 animals born on Calauit itself. The giraffes and zebras adapted best, browsing the island's grasslands and sc...

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Image: Jordan Balintac | CC BY-SA 4.0

Calauit Safari Park: Bongbong's Safari and the Revolution

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Michael Tadeo, CC BY-SA 4.0. During the Marcos years, the park served as a private playground for the presidential family. It became colloquially known as "Bongbong's Safari Park" after the president's son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was known for flying to the island by helicopter to hunt native wild boar. When ...

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Image: John Michael Tadeo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Calauit Safari Park: The Native Species That Quietly Flourished

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nairbest10, CC BY-SA 4.0. The park's most significant conservation story has nothing to do with Africa. In the 1980s, local officials expanded the program to include endangered Philippine species, and the results have been remarkable. The Calamian deer, declared critically endangered in 1981 with only 25 ...

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Image: Nairbest10 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Calauit Safari Park: An Unlikely Ark

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jordan Balintac, CC BY-SA 4.0. Calauit Safari Park defies simple judgment. It was born from a dictator's impulse, built on the displacement of an indigenous people, and stocked with animals ripped from their native continent. Six of the original eight African species are gone. Yet the park endures, and the con...

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Image: Jordan Balintac | CC BY-SA 4.0