Cheron Islets

The waters around Culion are the same waters around Coron. The same archipelago, the same limestone karst rising out of the same blue. The difference is how few people have heard of Culion, and how completely those waters have remained themselves as a result.

Culion was sealed off from the world for exactly one hundred years, from 1906 until the World Health Organization declared the island leprosy-free in 2006. A century of low development is rare on a tropical archipelago. The reefs survived it. The mangroves survived it. The light on the water in the late afternoon, when the sun drops behind the karst islands to the west, is what tropical light was before tourism found the tropics.

Today the local tourism office uses one official phrase to describe Culion: Paradise Regained. The town keeps a coral-rock church built in the 1700s from blocks of fossilised reef, a 1740 Spanish fort, and an archive inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. The bay holds Japanese WWII shipwrecks now overgrown with coral, ranked among the finest wreck dives in the world.

This listing covers two adjacent islets in those waters, near the well-known sandbar of Cheron Island, in the same bay as the overwater bungalows of Two Seasons Coron Island Resort.

The Land

Two lots. One acre between them.

• Lot A: 2,360 sqm
• Lot B: 1,653 sqm
• Combined: 4,013 sqm

These are not large parcels. They are intimate ones, the size where a thoughtful house, a swimming dock, and a small garden are exactly enough, and where every step takes you closer to the water rather than further from it.

The water itself is the asset. Calamian water is the kind divers fly across continents to find: clear enough at noon to read a book through, warm year-round, and full of life. From your own dock you will see schools of needlefish in the shallows and, on still mornings, the silhouettes of the karst islands of Coron Bay rising in the distance like an unfinished sentence.

What Surrounds You

Two Seasons Coron Island Resort & Spa sits in the same bay, with overwater bungalows, a private beach, and a full spa. Owners building on islands in this part of Palawan often use a resort like this as their base during construction, and as overflow for the kind of guests who want a proper bed within walking distance of the bar.

Culion town is a 30-minute speedboat ride away. The plaza, the coral-rock Immaculate Conception Church, the museum with its UNESCO-inscribed archives, the small market, the easy rhythm of a place that knows exactly what it is.

Coron town sits across the strait for shopping, restaurants, and onward connections.

The reefs and lagoons of Kayangan Lake, Twin Lagoons, Barracuda Lake, and the wrecks of Coron Bay are all within day-trip range of your own dock.

Access

• By air: Manila or Cebu to Francisco B. Reyes Airport on Busuanga Island. Roughly 75 minutes from Manila, daily flights.
• From the airport: Van and boat transfer to Culion, then a smaller boat to the islets.
• Once in the Calamians: Boats are the road network, and a small private boat is part of the pleasure of an island home here.

The waters around Culion are the same waters around Coron. The difference, for now, is how few people have heard of Culion.