Roughly eight kilometers from the city center, Tigatto used to be a Moro enclave as much as all other precolonial waterways around the gulf of Davao were. During the Spanish period, after it was reduced and turned into a Christian village, it hosted a number of converts from Mawab, Davao de Oro, who accepted the offer to resettle in the area.
When the Americans came, the Christianized village remained under the ecclesial care of the Jesuits. In a letter dated June 1, 1916, by Fr. Mario J. Sauras, a Jesuit priest, he mentioned Tigatto’s celebration of the feast of Saint Joseph as a patron. The priest called the residents of the place “some good Filipinos” and the village a “small town.”
In a report filed by the Philippine Health Service that same year, the place was chosen as one of nine sites classified as a special-class dispensary, or school dispensary.
A dispensary is “where medicine or medical or dental treatment is dispensed.” The Tigatto dispensary was under the care of male school teachers previously trained for the work.
The other areas categorized in the same breadth were Boston (Davao Oriental), Compostela (Davao de Oro), Kinablangan (Baganga, Davao Oriental), La Union (San Isidro, Davao Oriental), Lacaron (Malita, Davao Occidental), Samal Island, and Tagabakid (Mati City, Davao Oriental).
In the 1920s, Tigatto became one of many areas of Davao region that were concessioned as logging areas, chiefly under American and Japanese investors.
In the 1931-33 annual report of the Bureau of Forestry, the place was the HQ of the logging firm The Heirs of M. Y. Maruyama, a Japanese company with a daily capacity of 5,000 board feet.
During the war, especially at the tail-end of the Allied’s liberation of Davao City, Tigatto was one of the last strongholds of the retreating Japanese forces and became the focus of bombardments. Finally, it became the holdout of Imperial forces when they surrendered.
On April 14, 1945, B-24 bombers from Angaur, an island of Palau, pounded areas of Tigatto where Japanese supplies were kept and the personnel were hiding. Three weeks later, napalm bombs were dropped by Allied planes on May 7, knocking out pillboxes and destroying tanks.
That same day, more napalm bombs were dropped, directly hitting the Japanese naval headquarters and blanketing the building in flames.
After the conflict, Tigatto returned to where it was as a peaceful, agricultural community lying adjacent to Davao River. For decades, it was a regular community of contented families cultivating homesteads and was accessible only by a trail not too far away from the highway.
In the 1970s and 1980s, however, as a poor farming settlement, it became a hotbed of insurgency. Its neighboring villages, namely Mandug, Callawa, and Buhangin, were in similar setups at the time, and Tigatto was one of skirmish fields between the military and communist rebels.
Of particular interest was the 1984 incident when a band of Bangsa Moro Army (BMA) led by Kapitan Inggo terrorized the place and its neighborhood, pretending to hunt down insurgents. While the trouble was ordered investigated by Col. Geronimo Valderrama, then Davao Metropolitan District Commander chief, the problem resulted in displacement.
The colonel, in a report carried out by The Mindanao Daily Mirror, also dispatched a civic team to address the needs of the evacuees and to convince them to return to their residences. He also directed the formation of a PC detachment inside the compound of the sprawling Lapanday Plantation, to secure the barangays of Mandug and Tigatto.
Today, the once-reduced village, now neighbored by two impressive malls, is home to housing communities, and host to several thriving establishments lined along the main road that leads to the interior regions.
