Books

There's surprisingly little written specifically about the Calamian Islands, but a few books help fill in the context.

Ghost Fleet: The Sinking of the Imperial Japanese Navy by Andrew McKenzie is one of the few detailed accounts of the September 1944 raid that produced the wrecks Coron is now famous for, drawing on US Navy after-action reports and Japanese survivors' accounts. Essential reading if you plan to dive the wrecks.

Playing with Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island by James Hamilton-Paterson is one of the finest pieces of contemporary writing about the Philippines — a memoir of a year spent on a small uninhabited island off the coast of Marinduque. Not Coron, but the landscape and rhythms it describes will be instantly familiar.

Among the Mangroves by Charlie Walker is a short, beautifully written travelogue across Palawan including time spent on Coron and Culion. It gives a good sense of how rapidly the area is changing under tourism.

In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines by Stanley Karnow is the standard history of the American period — the era during which the leper colony at Culion (a short boat ride from Coron) became the largest in the world.