Note 2 — Letter from the Audiencia to Felipe III

Referring to the famous hot springs and health resort of Los Baños, situated on the southern coast of Laguna de Bay, thirty-five miles from Manila, at the foot of the volcanic mountains Maquiling and Los Baños. See Chirino’s account of these springs, in chap. X of his Relacion (Vol. XII of this series). Cf. the more detailed accounts by La Concepcion (Hist. de Philipinas, iv, pp. 134–151), Zuñiga (Estadismo, i, pp. 180–185), and Buzeta and Bravo (Diccionario, ii, pp. 168–179). The virtues of these waters were first made known by St. Pedro Bautista, the noted Franciscan martyr (Vol. VIII, p. 233), in the year 1590; and he undertook to found there a hospital, but for lack of means this project languished until [212n] 1604, when it was duly organized, under the charge of a Franciscan lay brother, Fray Diego de Santa Maria. Various grants were made to this institution, at different times, by colonial and local authorities; and in 1671 large and suitable buildings of stone were erected—which, however, were destroyed by fire in 1727. The hospital seems to have retrograded, in extent and management, early in its history; Zúñiga found it in very poor condition, at the end of the eighteenth century. See chapter on “Minero-medicinal waters” of the islands in U.S. Philippine Commission’s Report, 1900, iii, pp. 217–227.