We finally got to witness one of the biggest fluvial parades in the Philippies, the Bocaue River Festival, or simply the Bocaue Pagoda Festival.
The Festival's devotion is connected to the Holy Cross of Wawa or Krus sa Wawa, said to have been found at the Wawa section of Bocaue River during a typhoon in 1850. A drowning woman clung to the Cross and was saved, an event later deemed a miracle.
Since then, the St. Martin of Tours Parish celebrates the miracle at Wawa with a grand fluvial parade held every first Sunday of July. Then in 1993, a tragedy happened when the ceremonial barge overloaded with with devotees sank, killing over 200 people.
The Festival resumed in 2014, with proper safety measures in place, until the pandemic when it had to be stoppped.
It resumed in 2022, and now in 2023, brought back to much grander scale but with proper health and safety measures.
We were able to see the Pagoda up close, and followed the Holy Cross from the church to the procession going to the river.