Isla Hayahay Beach Resort & Restaurant is located on Pangangan Island, a small island of the coast of Calape, Bohol.
Pangangan was previously called “Panggawan” derived from the word “panggaw”.
PANGGAWAN is a kind of fish trap used by some of the local fishermen to catch fish. This kind of fishing was very popular within Pangangan Island in the old days.
The word “PANGGAWAN” changed to “Pangangan” and it is now the official name of this island.
Pangangan Island has eight Barangays (suburbs) namely; Lawis, Talisay, Kinabag-an, Magtongtong, Madangog, Looc, Lomboy, and Kahayag. Isla Hayahay Beach Resort & Restaurant is located in Barangay Lomboy.
The causeway that connects Pangangan Island with the main land (Bohol) was completely constructed by locals, without involving any engineering construction practices, after WWII, and is believed to be the longest causeway in the Philippines.
The causeway was completed in the 1950s and, for the first time, the residents of Pangangan enjoyed the convenience of road travel. But not for long. Barely two feet above water during high tide, the coral-and-limestone causeway was easily damaged by strong waves and typhoons, so it was often impassable, until two men found a solution.
Felipe Josol Ytac Sr. was the principal of Pangangan Elementary and High School when he and some student volunteers began planting hundreds of mangrove propagules at the approach of the causeway on Pangangan in the late 1950s .
This small beginning was enough to inspire Anastacio Toloy, who took over Ytac’s post in 1961, to continue the project. Toloy rallied his male students, most of them Boy Scouts, from the third grade to high school to plant mangroves along the causeway, while the girls were assigned to collect 100 propagules each at a nearby natural strand at the south side of the causeway.
Soon, mangrove planting became an annual event for Toloy and his students, who religiously planted more propagules, usually during the “Scouting Month” of October. Heartened by their initial success, the rest of the community started to pitch in, making the planting a regular feature of their weekend picnics. Learning from experience, they began planting the propagules at a much closer spacing than the usual 1 meter which resulted in higher mortality and branchy trees. Such close spacing allowed the young trees to protect each other from strong waves and also enhanced height growth. The mangroves flourished and, by 1982, the plantation covered a total area of 6 hectares stretching to 2.5 km toward the mainland. Pangangan Island today is protected by a mangrove plantation that spreads to a total area of about 54 hectares.
