Beneath the city’s roaring highway traffic lies a dark, jam-packed tunnel that roughly 100 families call home. Cramped and poorly ventilated, the 100-meter-long tunnel is reportedly filled with garbage, tangled electrical lines, and vermin. In the heart of Manila , some residents enter their living rooms by crawling through a narrow opening in the sidewalk.
Over the years, several social media influencers and documentary makers have visited the place to capture the lifestyle of the underground community. All of them show almost the same thing: families surviving in a place while dealing not just with heat and darkness but also with the constant noise of overhead traffic. The recent video in the list about the Manila tunnel was shared on Instagram by a video production company. Their shocking video starts with a woman crawling out of a hole in the side of a busy highway. The small space often forces residents to crouch or crawl, even when accessing the makeshift rooms they have created in the tunnel. You never realise that there’s a community living below it. He added, “When you’re driving on it, you have no idea there’s people living [under it]. He also asked the residents why they chose such a place; many attributed their choice to the high rent. He, however, added that there are also families who continue to live underground despite earning money. “Once you live here there’s no restrictions, there’s no boundary. Even cockroaches and rats go inside your house,” Edwin expressed. In addition to the other problems, the place reportedly tends to flood during rain. During a heavy downpour, water rushes in, often forcing residents to evacuate immediately. Despite the extremely rough conditions, some people say they are happy living in the tunnel. “We’re very happy. It’s one big happy family. Most of the rooms in the tunnel are made with flammable materials. (With inputs from Reuters).
I’ve been coming to Manila for the last 12 years and I’ve been on this highway so many times.
He said in his video, “You know what’s crazy. “So sometimes you live here temporarily and then when you find a job and earn something much better, you try and move out,” Edwin, a former resident of the tunnel who acted as Goldberg’s guide, said. One such resident told Goldberg.
Travel blogger and YouTuber Drew ‘Binsky’ Goldberg, who is known for covering ‘dark tourism’, visited the tunnel earlier this year.
