La Mesa Eco Park: Quezon City’s next Sentosa
By Deni Rose M. Afinidad
A MAJOR tourist attraction, Sentosa is a popular resort in Singapore, visited by some two million people a year for its 2-km sheltered beach, musical fountain which uses the interaction of lasers against water particles to create three-dimensional images, and historical fortifications in Fort Siloso, dating from World War II.
Soon, Filipinos and visitors of the Philippines need not go to Singapore to enjoy such a paradise as Sentosa. The La Mesa Eco Park in Fairview, Quezon City is a Sentosa in the making, especially now that an Eco Center and Eco Museum were recently opened as added recreational and educational attractions, said Orlando Andrade, Manila Water Sewerage System administrator.
Built by ABS-CBN Foundation Inc. in response to the growing concern on the sustainability of La Mesa Watershed’s rehabilitation and reforestation, the Eco Center and Eco Museum aim to educate the public about the importance of continued environmental sustainability specifically on the forests of La Mesa.
“[The Eco Center and Eco Museum] is a dream come true,” said environmentalist and former Senator Loren Legarda, one of the Eco Museum’s donors. “I hope the La Mesa Eco Park can be an example, an inspiration, to every city in the country when it comes to environmental protection.”
An interactive environmental museum for children similar to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Eco Museum includes a weather station where children can interactively participate and learn how to predict weather using weather measuring instruments.
To gather information about the myriad of flora and fauna inhabiting the park’s area, children can check out the museum’s animated, touch-screen displays of La Mesa’s ecosystem.
For aspiring engineers, a model of the La Mesa Dam and its filtration system, which provides filtration services for 1.5 million liters of drinking water for Manila’s three-million population, can also be found in the museum.
Dressed a la Sineskwela characters in science vests with clock, magnifying lens, and binoculars, kids can scoop the importance of trees in the ecosystem and explore the mammals, birds, insects, and spiders found in the museum’s focal charm—“The Tree”—a massive clump of four artificial trees modeled to depict the watershed’s endemic foliage. The Tree’s must-sees are its glow-in-the-dark scorpions and the “What time is it, Mr. Cricket?” corner, where kids can presumably tell the temperature of the environment by counting the chirping sounds of crickets.
The entrance fee for the museum is P30. School tours and other packages are also available for a discounted price.
The Eco Center, meanwhile, provides the facilities needed for large gatherings like seminars, conferences, and workshops that promote ecological conservation and preservation.
Opened to provide a combined natural recreational refuge with the educational purposes of an outdoor classroom, the Eco Park is envisioned to bring the people back to La Mesa as it did in the ‘50s, when the park was said to be famous for its gigantic swimming pool, beautiful picnic area, and rich biodiversity of plants and species. The park was then a center for recreation for families, and an abode to many indigenous species of kingfishers, monkeys, and wild pigs, until informal settlers started dwelling in the watershed and sucked out the land’s resources through illegal logging, unauthorized agricultural conversion, and burn farming.
By the ’90s, more than half of the forest was wiped out and only three foreign species of trees were left. If left unchecked, 85 percent of the watershed’s forest cover was estimated to have gone bald. The La Mesa Watershed was then on its way to extinction.
Through Bantay Kalikasan (Nature Watch), which envisions to promote and sustain La Mesa as a watershed of immense resource and educational value, 92 percent or 1,525 hectares of the La Mesa was reforested, while many new and returning species are starting to rejuvenate the park’s almost lost biodiversity.
To sustain Bantay Kalikasan’s conservation and environmental education efforts, the park harvests revenues through its attractions—a boating lagoon, a 50-year-old salt-water swimming pool, the orchidarium, fishing wharf, flower terraces, pavilions that can accommodate 100 to 300 people; biking and running trails, picnic grounds, and the Butterfly Garden. Fireflies also serve as the park’s nocturnal adornments, said AFI president Gina Lopez.
As of press time, Lopez said more than 30,000 students have toured the recreation site. This figure is expected to rise as an avian center, a biological laboratory, a nature interpretation center, another pool by summer next year, and horseback riding grounds and facilities are also planned to be included in the park, added Lopez.
Andrade similarly stated that by January, they are planning to spice up the park with a beautiful Filipino restaurant, and come March, they expect to see a ferry boat servicing visitors at the lagoon.
“Something new is happening all the time at the La Mesa Eco Park,” remarked Quezon City Mayor Sonny Belmonte. “For its unique facilities, it could be said that the park is the best we have in the country today.”
For more details about the Eco Park and its facilities and services, contact the La Mesa Admin Office at 430-4051 and look for Bong Genonangan.
Easter Celebration 2008. Present were Most Rev. Bishop Honesto Ongtioco, D.D., his Clergy, Guest Priests and Religious working and residing in the Diocese of Cubao, Philippines. How beautiful it is then to see when brothers and sisters dwell in perfect unity bonded with love which conquers all!
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