The Ruins & Balay Negrense — Negros Sugar Mansions

The Ruins 8am–8pm (~₱150); Balay Negrense Tue–Sun 9am–5:30pm (~₱60), closed Mon

The melancholy grandeur of Negros' sugar-boom aristocracy. The Ruins in Talisay is the skeletal Italianate mansion Don Mariano Lacson built for his Portuguese wife — its ornate concrete shell survived being torched in WWII to keep it from the Japanese, and now glows gold at sunset (the 'Taj Mahal of Negros'). Twenty minutes on in Silay, the 'Paris of Negros,' the 1890s Balay Negrense is a restored hacendero's wooden mansion you walk room by room, furnished as a sugar baron lived. Local's tip: do The Ruins late into golden hour, and pair Balay Negrense with Silay's other ancestral houses and old bakeries — but it's shut Mondays.

Source: en.wikipedia.org