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Manila by the bayside is the child of the Mother Pasig, born upon silted soils deposited as a tongue of swampland at the river's mouth. There on the alluvial delta land grew a white flowered mangrove plant called inlaid and a riverine village called Maynila (where the nilad grows). The ancient process of accretion seemed to foretell the accumulation and synthesis of cultures that would form in later eras the city known as Manila.
Manila wasn't planned, it was accumulated, like waters seeping back from the bay over the centuries. The river settlement grew from a 10th century Malay entrepot into Spanish Intramuros, a 16th century medieval fortress, blossomed into 19th century Manila, an urbanized Asian city, and finally sprawled across some 630 square kilometers as Metro Manila, the dense metropolis of today. Around the stonewalled inner city of Intramuros - center of Spanish government and religion - the various native towns burgeoned on both sides of the river ( the earliest highway within a network of estuaries), and later spilled north and south, squeezing between previous towns, converging all boundaries, races and breeds.
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