A record from the City Government of Bislig confirms that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. made an official visit to Bislig City on May 6 to personally validate the site of the proposed Bislig City Fish Port. The visit is documented in Executive Order No. 37, series of 2026, which activated the city's Emergency Operations Center and Incident Management Team specifically "for the official visit of the president of the Philippines... in Bislig City for the site validation of the Bislig Fish Port." The order was issued the same day, May 6, 2026.
The executive order itself does not describe what happened during the visit, and no national news coverage of the trip has surfaced. But its existence in the city's own official records confirms that a fish port project for Bislig has reached the point where the national government is personally inspecting the proposed site, a step that typically precedes funding approval and construction in major infrastructure projects.
A project years in the making
Bislig's push for a dedicated fish port is not new. City records show that as far back as May 2023, Mayor Florencio C. Garay met with the Philippine Fisheries Development Authority (PFDA) in Quezon City, where the agency committed an additional 100 million pesos toward completing phase 2 of the Mangagoy fish port and expressed support for developing Pier 1 and Pier 2 once they came fully under the city's possession. That meeting also discussed plans for cold storage, an administrator's office, a Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) office, a fish car terminal, and a tourism area where fresh catch could be cooked and sold on-site.
Separately, the PFDA has for some time listed the "Construction of Bislig City Fish Port (Design and Build)" among the bidding documents on its Regional Fish Ports Program, the national initiative that funds fish port complexes in strategic landing centers across the country. That program has produced visible results elsewhere in the region this year: in April, the Department of Agriculture inspected the two-phase modernization of the Surigao City Fish Port, and in July, President Marcos personally inspected rehabilitation work at the Navotas Fish Port Complex in Metro Manila, part of what he has described as a plan to build ten modern fish ports nationwide.
Why it matters for Bislig
Surigao del Sur has historically posted the highest fisheries production in the Caraga region, and Bislig's coastal position at the mouth of the Mangagoy River has long made fishing and fish trading part of the local economy, alongside the pier facilities left over from the PICOP era. A modern, PFDA-standard fish port would give local fishing families and vendors proper landing, cold storage, and market facilities instead of relying on informal docks, potentially cutting post-harvest losses and giving Bislig-caught fish better access to buyers outside the city.
A presidential site visit does not guarantee construction will follow immediately. Similar projects in other cities, including Surigao City's, have taken years between initial agreements and a finished port. Still, a sitting president visiting Bislig specifically to inspect the ground where the facility would sit is a concrete signal that the project has national-level attention.
What to watch next
The city government has not published a follow-up account of the May 6 visit, and neither PFDA nor Malacañang have issued a public statement specific to Bislig's fish port as of this writing. Bislig Today will report further details, including any funding timeline or groundbreaking date, as soon as the city or PFDA makes them public.