Hacienda Luisita is a 6,000-hectare sugar estate just south of Tarlac City — the biggest single landholding in the Philippines and one of the most politically loaded properties in the country. The Cojuangco family bought it in 1957 with a Central Bank loan that came with a condition (long ignored) to distribute land to the workers. From this estate came Cory Aquino, her son Noynoy (also president), and the policy debates that have defined Philippine land reform for forty years.
Most of the hacienda is fields, mills, and access roads, not visitor territory — but the perimeter and the adjacent Luisita Industrial Park give a sense of the scale, with sugarcane stretching to every horizon. The Hacienda Luisita Golf and Country Club and the Aquino Center are the two parts you can actually visit. Drive through with the windows open in the dry season and you'll smell molasses for kilometres around the sugar mill.