The story
Pintados-Kasadyaan Festival in Tacloban
Pintados-Kasadyaan is a June festival in Tacloban City, Leyte, combining the Pintados tradition of body-painted, tattoo-patterned dancers honoring Santo Nino with the Kasadyaan street dance competition showcasing contingents from festivals across the Eastern Visayas region, staged together over a full day of parade and performance.
The word Pintados, meaning painted or tattooed, was used by early Spanish chroniclers to describe the pre-colonial peoples of the Visayas region, whose extensive body tattooing marked status, achievement in battle and identity, and the term is also understood to be the origin of the name Visayas itself in some historical accounts.