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BetterBicolRegion V · Philippines

Sorsogon · Municipality

Municipality of Donsol

The whale shark town. Donsol’s municipal waters hold the largest known seasonal aggregation of whale sharks in Southeast Asia, and the interaction they built around it is regulated rather than open water.

Population
51,781

Confirmed

Barangays
51

Confirmed

Land area
156.20 km²

Single source

PSGC code
0506207000

Confirmed

Income class
1st class municipality

Single source

District
Not sourced

Not sourced

Municipality. On the Sorsogon coast facing the Burias Pass, 66 km from Sorsogon City and 94 km from Legazpi. Fifty-one barangays, the most of any municipality we have published.
Two sources, two income classesThe gap here is four income classes wide. PSA’s current PSGC says 1st class. DILG’s own Donsol profile says 3rd class, and so does Wikipedia. The DILG profile is plainly stale: it names a mayor who left office years ago and gives the population as 43,996. RA 11964, the Automatic Income Classification of LGUs Act of 2023, moved many LGUs up, which would explain the change. We could not find a BLGF or DOF issuance naming Donsol, so we are not asserting it. Both figures stand until the primary record is read.
Two sources, two land areasTwo figures, and they do not agree. The PSA lineage gives 156.20 km squared, dated 2013. DILG’s Donsol profile gives 15,299 hectares, which is 152.99 km squared. That is a gap of about 3.2 km squared and the two sources are genuinely independent of each other, so this is a real disagreement rather than one number cited twice. Neither is corroborated. Separately, the municipal waters run to 27,780 hectares, which is larger than the land area and is a different measurement entirely.

Population is the 2024 POPCEN, against 50,281 in the 2020 census. PSA’s 51 barangay counts sum to exactly 51,781, so the municipal total agrees with its own components. Largest barangay is Ogod at 4,204, smallest is Old Maguisa at 213. The 2020 count of 50,281 comes from PhilAtlas rather than a PSA table we could open, so it is secondary. PSA’s record for Donsol. Badges mean what they say: Confirmed is two independent sources agreeing, Single source is one source not yet checked against a second, Not sourced is a field we leave empty rather than fill. Our sources.

The official website

What Donsol publishes

Checked as part of our regional transparency audit. A municipality with no site is the normal case in Bicol, not an outlier, and that is the problem.

Domain live, nothing published

Donsol has the domain and not the disclosures

https://www.donsol.gov.ph/

https://elgu-donsol-sorsogon-news.e.gov.ph/

donsol.gov.ph resolves, loads fine for a plain non-browser client, and is a maintenance placeholder. The entire page reads “Website Under Maintenance” and offers two links, both to tourism: a tourism site and a tourism Facebook page. There is no Transparency Seal, no Full Disclosure section, no Citizens Charter, no budget and no procurement page anywhere on it. There is also an eLGU portal on the national e.gov.ph domain which returned metadata and no readable body. So a town whose whale sharks earn foreign currency publishes its tourism channel and not one mandated disclosure. DILG’s own contact record for Donsol lists no telephone, no email and no website at all.

The full scorecardWhat an LGU must postHave a link we missed?

Public money

What the national data can say about Donsol

Every city page on this site carries a per-LGU cut of the DPWH project dataset. For a municipality that cut cannot be made, and the reason is more useful than a number would be.

The DPWH dataset records two geographic fields per project, the region and the District Engineering Office. There is no municipality field. So the only way to attribute a project to a town is to search the project text, and that matches any barangay of the same name anywhere in the country.

Searching DONSOL nationwide on 18 August 2026 returns 194 projects worth ₱10.07B, and every one of them is already in Region V. Unlike a common place name, this one has no national noise at all.

District office the record sits in Records Could it be Donsol?
Sorsogon DEO 161 Possible
Region V regional office 25 Possible
Albay 3rd DEO 7 Not Donsol
Albay 2nd DEO 1 Not Donsol

8 of the 194 sit in district offices that cannot contain Donsol, so they are provably somewhere else. That is a measured false positive floor of 4.1 percent, not an estimate.

The 161 records in Sorsogon DEO are the closest honest bracket, and that district office serves LGUs beyond this one. So the true figure for Donsol is at or below 161 projects and this dataset cannot narrow it further. We would rather print that sentence than a precise number that is wrong.

Measured 18 August 2026 against the DPWH projects API, the dataset behind bisto.ph, read across every page of results. Status split across the Region V records: 141 completed, 36 ongoing, 17 still for procurement. Projects across Bicol.

Flood control across the regionWho is building itReport a project here

Elected officials

Who holds office in Donsol

Names carry the same badges as the figures above. We publish an unchecked name as unchecked, or not at all. A wrong name against a real office is the fastest way for a site like this to lose its standing.

Mayor
Chuck Lubiano
Single source
Vice Mayor
Tanang Abetria
Single source
Sangguniang Bayan
8 elected members, listed below
Single source
Ex-officio seats
Liga ng mga Barangay and SK federation presidents, not named in any source we read
Not sourced
Barangay captains
51 barangays, none collected
Not sourced

Sangguniang Bayan of Donsol

8 elected memberspublished

  1. Jeszar Ocaya
  2. Ruby Hernandez
  3. Tonette Aquino
  4. Ingrid Bonaobra
  5. Jun Abliter
  6. Ryan Tarog
  7. Jose Owen Averilla
  8. Ray Aquino

Term 2025 to 2028, elected 12 May 2025. Names as COMELEC printed them on the 2025 ballot, read 18 August 2026, with the eight winners taken from the election returns. The ballot itself reads “vote for 8”, which is how we know the seat count. COMELEC’s 2025 ballot face for Donsol. The two ex-officio seats are not named in either source, so they are not listed. Donsol publishes no photographs of its officials, so this page carries none. Something out of date?

Ballot names, not legal namesThese are ballot names, and that is a weaker record than Malinao has. For Malinao we could read DILG’s masterlist of elected officials, which carries legal names. For Sorsogon that same PDF truncates before the province, so our source of record is COMELEC’s 2025 ballot face for Donsol, which prints the name as it appeared on the ballot. Wikipedia gives the mayor’s legal name as Ralph Walter Lubiano and the vice mayor’s as Ma. Christiana R. Abetria; neither is corroborated, so neither is published as fact here. The returns we checked are also labelled partial and unofficial by the outlet that ran them. Everyone on this page is therefore badged single source, including the mayor. If you have the DILG list for Sorsogon, that one document upgrades this whole section.

Worth knowing

Two things worth knowing about Donsol

Corrections rather than trivia, and the kind of thing a resident or a reporter would otherwise have to take on trust.

The sanctuary is the town’s biggest public assetDonsol’s municipal waters, 27,780 hectares of them, are a declared whale shark sanctuary, and hunting whale sharks has been banned nationally since 1998. A peer-reviewed study photo-identified 479 individual whale sharks here between 2007 and 2016, which was 44 percent of every whale shark then catalogued in the Philippines, and over half of them returned in later seasons. Boats are capped at 30 and interactions are run by trained Butanding Interaction Officers with the boat operators’ association, under BFAR and the municipal government. Season runs November to June. On the peak, the study says February to May and the Philippine Information Agency says February to April, so both are printed. McCoy et al., Frontiers in Marine Science, 7 August 2018.
We will not quote you an interaction feeThis is the most searched question about Donsol and we are leaving it blank on purpose. Every peso figure we found for the boat and registration fee came from travel blogs and review sites. No fee schedule published by the municipality or by tourism authorities was reachable, because donsol.gov.ph is a maintenance page and the eLGU portal serves no content. A fee that changes by ordinance, quoted from a blog post of unknown age, is exactly how a visitor arrives with the wrong amount of cash. If the municipality publishes the schedule, or you can send us the ordinance, it goes up the same day. On visitor scale, the newest figure we could source is old: more than 27,000 tourists in 2012, and over 1.5 million US dollars a year attributed to the interaction. the municipality’s own domain, read 18 August 2026.

Services

Getting something done in Donsol

Twelve of these are handled by the municipal hall and four are national services with offices in Bicol. With no reachable Citizens Charter for Donsol, the requirements below are the regional baseline rather than this town’s own posting.

Certificates and Vital RecordsBusiness Permits and LicencesTaxes and PaymentsHealth and WellnessSocial Services and AssistanceEducation and Scholarships
All 16 service categoriesWhat a Citizens Charter must containBack to Sorsogon
Worth passing on?