Bicolano

The Bicolano are an Austronesian group of the southeastern Luzon peninsula that bears their name, the Bicol region. Their ancestors were Iron Age settlers from Taiwan, and Neolithic burial jars and pottery show a long-settled farming society before Spanish contact.

Their folk epic the Ibalong recalls that they were once called Ibalong, after Gat Ibal, who ruled Sawangan on the site of modern Legazpi; the later name Bikol derives from a word meaning meandering, after the region's principal river. They speak a dozen closely related Bikol dialects and grow rice, coconuts and abacá hemp in a typhoon-swept volcanic landscape.

Augustinian and Franciscan missionaries brought Roman Catholicism, and in 1712 a seminarian introduced devotion to Our Lady of Peñafrancia, whose carved image became the centre of Naga's annual fluvial procession.