General Santos Tuna Festival — Tuna Capital of the Philippines

Every September, the city of General Santos — GenSan to everyone who knows it — throws the most delicious festival in the Philippines. The General Santos Tuna Festival celebrates the city's identity as the Tuna Capital of the Philippines, and with good reason: the General Santos Fish Port Complex handles over 200,000 metric tons of yellowfin tuna annually, making it one of the five largest tuna ports on Earth. For one week in September, that fish becomes the center of an exuberant civic celebration.

The festival begins for serious visitors at 4:00 AM with a visit to the fish port's dawn auction, where tuna ranging from 20 to over 100 kilograms are assessed, bid on, and sold by a system of hand signals and shouted numbers that has not changed in decades. The fish are arrayed on ice in rows under fluorescent lights, their silver flanks glinting — the largest specimens going to Tokyo's Tsukiji intermediaries for a premium that Japanese sushi chefs pay gladly. Watching a 60-kilogram yellowfin change hands for ₱80,000 before sunrise is an education in global fish economics.

As the day progresses the festival moves into the streets: the Tuna Queen pageant, a street parade featuring floats shaped like giant tuna and costumed performers, cooking competitions where chefs compete in categories including sashimi, kinilaw, and tuna steak, and the GenSan Night Market where every vendor — without exception — features tuna in some form. Eat it raw with calamansi and ginger, grilled over coconut husk coals, simmered in coconut cream with lemongrass, or as a GenSan specialty tuna paksiw. This is the freshest fish you will eat in your life, in the city that defines what fresh tuna means.