Why Don’t All the Streets in Siargao Have Names?

10 Nov

Finding your way around Siargao is a little different, and that’s part of island life.

If you spend enough time exploring Siargao, you’ll eventually notice something unusual: plenty of roads don’t have names. While the main roads through towns such as General Luna are easy enough to identify, turn down a smaller cross street, back road or residential lane and there’s a good chance it has no official street name at all.

For visitors, including local Manilans, accustomed to navigating cities where practically every road has a name and every building has a street number, it can take a little getting used to.

Why are so many streets unnamed?

Part of the answer lies in how communities across the Philippines historically developed. Long before Siargao became an international tourism destination, there simply wasn't the same need for a detailed urban-style addressing system.

Communities were organised around barangays, sitios and puroks, with people relying heavily on local knowledge and landmarks to describe where somebody lived or where something could be found. Smaller roads often developed organically as access routes between homes, coconut land, farms and neighbouring communities rather than as formally planned suburban streets.

The way land is divided and developed has also created entirely new roads. Larger parcels of land, including former coconut and agricultural land, can be subdivided into smaller titled lots and sold to different owners. As these previously undeveloped lots become homes, villas and businesses, new access roads and lanes are created between the land divisions. In many cases, these are roads that simply never existed before and therefore have no established name.

Street naming in the Philippines is also a formal local-government matter rather than something that automatically happens when a road appears. The country's laws have given municipal authorities responsibility for naming streets for more than a century, and today official naming and renaming continues through local government processes. Across the Philippines, local councils still pass ordinances specifically giving names to previously unnamed streets and access roads.

Siargao's rapid development has made this old system much more noticeable. Roads that may once have served only a handful of local homes can now lead to villas, restaurants, cafés, surf businesses and accommodation, while completely new access roads continue to appear as land is subdivided and developed. With the formal process of creating and approving new street names taking time, Siargao's growth has simply moved faster than the system can keep up.

*Click to view a complete map of General Luna.*

So how do we give directions?

We've developed our own Siargao way of doing things. Instead of giving you a street address, a business might tell you that they're "off Tourism Road," "just behind the church," "near the basketball court" or "down the road beside [another well-known business]."

Then there's the modern solution: Google Maps.

For many businesses around General Luna and the rest of Siargao, dropping the business name or its map pin into Google Maps is far more accurate than typing an address. It takes you directly to the location without needing to know whether the little road you're travelling along actually has a name. Not all businesses have set this up, so patience is needed.

And when technology fails, there's always local knowledge. Ask someone nearby and there's a reasonable chance they'll know the place you're looking for — or know somebody who does.

Getting around with local drivers

Whether you’re taking a tuk-tuk, van or private transfer, even local drivers won’t know every new business, accommodation or back road in Siargao. The island is developing quickly, businesses open and move, new roads appear, and many destinations don't have conventional street addresses in the first place.

And if your driver hasn't heard of a particular business, don't take that as a reflection of the business itself. It doesn't necessarily mean it's new, unpopular or not well known. With so many businesses spread across unnamed roads and different parts of the island, it's simply impossible for every driver to know every location.

If your driver isn't immediately sure where your destination is, a little patience is always appreciated. Showing them the business on Google Maps, providing a nearby landmark or mentioning the main road it's located off can usually solve the problem quickly.

Think of it less like jumping into a taxi in a major city and reciting a numbered street address, and more like navigating with someone who knows an island that is constantly changing.

It's all part of Siargao and ‘island life’

Unnamed streets can seem strange when you first arrive, but they also tell you something about Siargao's history. This wasn't an island designed around tourism, GPS and thousands of businesses. Its roads grew alongside small communities where people already knew where everything, and everyone, was.

Today, old island geography and modern technology exist side by side. We use barangays, landmarks, local knowledge and Google Maps to fill in the gaps.

So when someone in Siargao tells you they're "just off the main road, past the coconut trees, beside the little shop", don't be surprised.

There's a good chance those are genuinely the most useful directions you're going to get.