You should not leave Cebu without having to taste lechon. Carcar City offers authentic lechon de Cebu. In the city, you can dine in at Bebie’s Lechon. Other Cebu specialties include puso (hanging rice), best paired with barbeque in Larsian.

Carcar lechons are found inside the public market and are usually ready for take-out. You can, however, choose to dine in one of the carenderias nearby and pair it with puso (hanging rice).

Carcar lechons are found inside the public market and are usually ready for take-out. You can, however, choose to dine in one of the carenderias nearby and pair it with puso (hanging rice). 

Lechon! Lechoon’!

Imagine a covered market packed full of sellers yelling this, their calls layered like a church choir, each straining to be louder the rest. Now imagine the sellers holding strips of crisp, fatty pork skin in their outstretched hands, imploring you to try just one succulent bite. Add in the rich, heady aroma of roasting pigs saturating the humid air and you’ve got an idea of the porcine sensory overload that hits you as soon as you walk into the lechon market in Carcar, Cebu.

“Carcar one of the oldest towns in Cebu”

Carcar is one of the oldest towns in Cebu — it became a municipality in 1599 — and its lechon has nearly as long a history. The dish was originally introduced by the Spanish, who prized young pigs still drinking their mother’s leche, or milk, for their tender and delicately-flavored flesh. The lechon in Carcar, though, is undeniably Filipino. The pigs are stuffed with lemongrass and garlic and roasted on a bamboo spit for hours, until the flesh is meltingly tender and the skin is a deep burnished bronze, dark and crisp as toffee.