San Agustín Church, Manila

The oldest stone church in the Philippines was built because the two before it had burned down. Begun in 1586 to the design of the Augustinian friar Juan Macías and declared finished in 1607, San Agustín was a structural argument first and a devotional building second: adobe-stone walls of great thickness, a barrel vault on transverse arches, and buttresses sized for a city that loses its buildings to earthquakes rather than to age. The argument held. The church survived the tremors of 1645, 1863 and 1880 and, in 1945, the Battle of Manila, which destroyed almost everything else inside Intramuros; it was the only structure in the walled city left standing. The Philippine government named it a National Historical Landmark in 1976, and in 1993 UNESCO inscribed it with three provincial churches as the Baroque Churches of the Philippines.