Long before it became popular for its campuses, bustling student hangouts, and dormitories, Manila’s university belt, or U-Belt, was a flood-prone bogland that many people avoided. It took several years of development before a swamp transformed into the country’s most school-dense area.

Not exactly your prime real estate

Before the American Period, long before it became home to some of the country’s oldest universities, Manila’s U-Belt—covering the districts of Sampaloc, Quiapo, and San Miguel—was a low-lying marshland crisscrossed by esteros, or tidal creeks, that fed into the Pasig River.

Mendiola in the San Miguel district had it the roughest. National Artist Nick Joaquin even described the place during the American colonial period as “a swampland that was empty and desolate.”  The only signs of life in the area then were a few summer villas along La Calzada de Malacañan.

Sampaloc, meanwhile, had a more rustic vibe, with sampaloc trees thriving alongside rice fields. The district takes its name from the Tagalog word for tamarind. In 1901, two years into the Philippine-American War, Sampaloc officially became part of Manila under a colonial reorganization.

Lavandera roots

Before there were dorms and eateries, the area that would later be called U-Belt was teeming with lavanderas, or Manila’s washerwomen. With water running through the esteros, the area became the city’s biggest open-air laundromat.

These key waterways during the American colonial period were the Estero de Sampaloc (spanned over a kilometer near Piy Margal Street to Estero de Aviles), Estero de Sulucan (originated from where the present UST grandstand now stands going to Quiapo), Estero de Valencia (runs through portions of Sampaloc and the neighboring Santa Mesa district before draining to the Pasig River), and Estero de Alix (ran through Morayta, now Nicanor Reyes Street).

Today, Parts of the Estero de Sulucan have been completely built over or converted into underground drainage, while Estero de Alix was filled to accommodate urban expansion. UST and Far Eastern University were later built over filled-up parts of the creek.

During the American colonial period, women gathered daily along the Estero de Alix and Estero de Sulucan (which then started where the present-day UST grandstand is now located) to wash and scrub clothes for Manila’s wealthier elite living in the nearby San Miguel and Quiapo districts. All day, the area was filled with the thud of palu-palos, or the wooden paddles wielded by lavanderas and lavaderos as they whacked away at dirty clothes.

After washing and rinsing, lavanderas and lavanderos would hang the clothes in big, open clearings to sun-dry and bleach them. Those open grounds are now some of the paved-over parts of the U-Belt.

U-Belt ground zero: Mendiola

Mendiola was where the U-Belt’s shift from bogland to campuses really started. Five pioneering schools that started elsewhere relocated and planted roots here to form the famed Mendiola Consortium. These were:

• Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Consolación (1901) — now La Consolación College Manila
• El Colegio de San Beda (1901) — Benedictine-founded, now San Beda University
• Centro Escolar de Señoritas (1907) — now Centro Escolar University, a pioneer in women’s higher education
• Holy Ghost School (1913) — now College of the Holy Spirit. Closed its Mendiola campus in 2022 after 109 years of service.
• Manila East High School (1923) — one of the oldest high schools in Manila, now known as Victorino Mapa High School.

Backfilling and draining soon turned the swampy area into actual campuses. Fast forward to 2024, and the College of the Holy Spirit leased part of its Manila campus to the National Teacher’s College Mendiola on a five-year deal — proof this land is still shuffling hands over a century later.

Meet the rest of the founding squad

Over the next few decades, a few more schools showed up in the surrounding marsh around the same era:

• Manila Law College (1899) —  Started as Escuela de Derecho, founded by Felipe Calderon in Quiapo. It’s the oldest non-sectarian school in the area, and early students literally had class in their professors’ living rooms.
• National University (1900) — Began as Colegio Filipino in Sampaloc, becoming one of the first major secular schools north of the Pasig River.

And then Sampaloc got its big break

Sampaloc’s real transformation as part of the U-Belt began when Manila’s biggest and oldest schools outgrew their old campuses and moved north to seek more space. These were:

• University of Santo Tomas (moved to Sampaloc from Intramuros in 1927) — UST relocated to its now-present massive 21-hectare property in the former Hacienda Sulucan area and basically cemented Sampaloc as U-Belt central.
• Far Eastern University (1928) — Founded by Nicanor Reyes Sr., FEU rose fast at the corner of Azcarraga (now C.M. Recto) and Morayta with its unique Art Deco.
• University of the East (1946) — Landed post-WWII along C.M. Recto and quickly grew into one of the country’s biggest student populations, locking in U-Belt as an actual belt of schools.

Between Mendiola’s founding five and Sampaloc’s big-name transplants, the U-Belt as we know it was officially born.

But progress came at an expense

As schools redeveloped the swampland, they didn’t just build around the waterways and creeks—they erased them. Creeks and esteros got backfilled, the marshes drained, and the floodplains were paved flat. That meant the lavanderas and the lavanderos lost their water source and their drying fields. The daily communal laundry days were no more, and they had to relocate to the city’s edges or work inside the households of the school staff who had just displaced them.

Descendants of the lavanderos and lavanderas did not just disappear—they adapted. By the mid-1900s, their children swapped washing clothes by the creeks for the student economy booming around them. They transformed their old wooden family homes into the very first boarding houses, dormitories, and carinderias (eateries).

Over a hundred years and endless concrete later, the U-Belt’s swamp wasn’t really erased. Urban development just covered it up.  Years of draining, backfilling, and paving were not enough to defeat the marsh. With each rainy-season downpour, Manila’s U-Belt swamp creeps back to take center stage and dish out its sweet revenge.

Check us out on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube, to be the first to know about the latest news and coolest trends!