Piña Weaving of Aklan

Piña cloth is made from the leaves of the red Spanish pineapple, grown in Aklan specifically for fibre rather than fruit, and the process is extraordinarily laborious: leaves are scraped by hand with a shard or a coconut shell to release the fine liwis fibres, which are washed, dried, knotted end to end by hand into a continuous thread - thousands of knots for a single warp - and then woven on a wooden pedal loom into a cloth so sheer it is almost transparent and strong enough to last generations. A metre takes days. It is the fabric of the formal barong Tagalog and of heirloom church vestments, and it has always been expensive. UNESCO inscribed the Aklan tradition on its intangible heritage list in 2023. Workshops around Kalibo demonstrate the scraping, knotting and weaving, and the town's shops sell the cloth by the metre and made up.

What you actually see

• The leaf scraping - fibre extracted by hand from pineapple leaves.
• The knotting - fibres joined end to end into thread.
• The pedal looms - sheer cloth woven slowly.
• The finished piña - transparent fabric sold by the metre.

When to go

November to May for travel. Weekday working hours; workshops are small and generally closed on Sundays.

Honest expectations

Real piña is expensive and slow to make - much of what is sold as piña elsewhere is piña-seda blended with silk or plain jusi. Ask what you are buying. Workshops are homes and small sheds, not showrooms.

Nearby

The Bakhawan Eco-Park is in Kalibo; Boracay's ferry port at Caticlan is about an hour and a half.