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BetterBicolRegion V · Philippines

Albay · Municipality · 1st district of Albay

Municipality of Tiwi

The geothermal town. Tiwi hosts one of the first geothermal power stations commissioned in the Philippines, on the flank of Mount Malinao, and it is also known for coron, its handmade pottery.

Population
56,871

Confirmed

Barangays
25

Confirmed

Land area
105.76 km²

Single source

PSGC code
0500518000

Confirmed

Income class
1st class municipality

Confirmed

District
1st district of Albay

Single source

Municipality. In the 1st district of Albay with Tabaco City, Bacacay, Malilipot, Malinao and Santo Domingo. On the eastern coast facing Lagonoy Gulf, bounded by Sagnay in Camarines Sur to the north, Malinao to the south and Buhi to the west.
Two sources, two land areasTwo figures about 10 percent apart, and the municipality claims the larger one. The PSA lineage gives 105.76 km squared, dated 2013. Tiwi’s own government profile says 116.28 km squared, and DILG’s LGU profile independently gives 11,628 hectares, which is the same number. So the two higher figures agree to the hectare, but both most likely originate in the LGU’s own self-reported area, which makes them weakly independent rather than a genuine second measurement. We print the PSA figure in the panel and both here. Neither is corroborated by anything that measured the ground.

Population is the 2024 POPCEN, against 56,444 in the 2020 census. PSA’s 25 barangay counts sum to exactly 56,871, so the municipal total agrees with its own components. Largest barangay is Cale at 6,124, smallest is Dap-dap at 937. The barangay code series runs to 028 while only 25 barangays exist, so three codes have been retired; because the 25 listed populations sum exactly to the total, the list is complete. PSA’s record for Tiwi. 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 Tiwi 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.

Site works, disclosures empty

Tiwi built the Transparency page and left it blank

https://tiwi.albay.gov.ph/

Tiwi has a real website and it is the best-built municipal site we have looked at: server-rendered HTML that a crawler or a slow connection can read without JavaScript, a GOVPH banner, a municipal profile, barangay and department listings, Sanggunian member profiles and an ordinance archive. It also has a Transparency menu item, and that page is an empty template with no documents on it. The Tourism page is an empty shell too. We found no Transparency Seal, no Full Disclosure section, no Citizens Charter, no budget and no procurement page. So the navigation promises disclosure and the disclosure is not there, which from outside is indistinguishable from compliance. One more structural note: the site sits under the albay.gov.ph provincial domain rather than its own, so Tiwi’s web presence depends on the province keeping that domain running, and the province’s own site has posted nothing since January 2023.

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

Public money

What the national data can say about Tiwi

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 TIWI nationwide on 18 August 2026 returns 103 projects worth ₱3.79B. Narrowing to Region V leaves 77 worth ₱3.51B. Neither figure is Tiwi’s.

The 26 records outside Bicol sit in Region VI (15), Region XIII (10), Region VII (1), so they are other places that share the name.

District office the record sits in Records Could it be Tiwi?
Albay 1st DEO 74 Possible
Region V regional office 3 Possible

No record in this set sits in a district office that could not contain this town, so there is no measurable false positive floor here. That is unusual and it is a property of the name, not of the method.

The 74 records in Albay 1st DEO are the closest honest bracket, and that district also covers Tabaco City, Malinao, Bacacay, Malilipot and Santo Domingo. So the true figure for Tiwi is at or below 74 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: 70 completed, 5 ongoing, 2 still for procurement. Projects across Bicol.

Flood control across the regionWho is building itReport a project here

Elected officials

Who holds office in Tiwi

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
Jose Morel Cuerdo Climaco
Confirmed
Vice Mayor
Jaime Clutario Villanueva
Confirmed
Sangguniang Bayan
8 elected members, listed below
Confirmed
Ex-officio seats
Liga ng mga Barangay and SK federation presidents, not named in any source we read
Not sourced
Barangay captains
25 barangays, none collected
Not sourced

Sangguniang Bayan of Tiwi

8 elected memberspublished

  1. Ma. Theresa Beato Ciocson
  2. Jerahmeel Climacosa Clerigo
  3. Edgardo Laguador Capa
  4. Aiken Clutario Villanueva
  5. Cherry Ann Colina Oliquiano
  6. Katherine Nacion Salcedo
  7. Rey Madrelejos Kallos
  8. Ryan Kevin Ruaya Carlet

Term 2025 to 2028, elected 12 May 2025. Names as DILG Region V spells them in its masterlist of elected local officials, read 18 August 2026, and every one of the ten cross-checked against COMELEC’s 2025 ballot face for Tiwi, which prints ballot nicknames. Two different kinds of record, ten out of ten agreeing, no conflicts. This is the cleanest officials record of the three municipalities published here so far. The DILG masterlist. The two ex-officio seats are not named in either source, so they are not listed. Tiwi publishes no photographs of its officials, so this page carries none. Something out of date?

Worth knowing

Three things worth knowing about Tiwi

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

The town hosts a power station and publishes no budgetTiwi Geothermal Power Plant has been generating since 1979, with further units in 1982. It is owned and run by AP Renewables, Inc., an Aboitiz Power subsidiary that acquired it on privatisation in 2009. Capacity is disputed: the Asian Development Bank’s own review puts installed gross capacity at 234 MW, while Wikipedia’s article on the town says 289 MW, so both are printed. As of the third quarter of 2018 the plant was running at roughly half capacity because of steam supply constraints. On what the host community gets, the ADB records 13.1 million pesos remitted to the national wealth tax fund over one year to September 2018, and 42.3 million pesos between 2015 and 2019 under the DOE’s Energy Regulation 1-94 host community fund. Those are the only figures we could source, they are six years old, and they are published by the lender rather than by the municipality. Tiwi’s own Transparency page is empty. Asian Development Bank, extended annual review, June 2020.
The hot springs are real, the national park is not sourcedThe Tiwi geothermal field runs across Naglagbong, Kapipihan, Matalibong and Bariis. Matalibong and Bariis are confirmed barangays of Tiwi, with PSA codes, so those sectors are inside the municipality. The NCCA places Naglagbong in Barangay Naga, Tiwi, three kilometres from the town proper, and describes a highly active hot spring area with resorts built on several springs. What we will not do is call it a national park. The name “Tiwi Springs National Park” appears on the NCCA page and all over travel sites, and we could not find a DENR proclamation, an RA 11038 entry, or a hectarage for it anywhere. Until a proclamation turns up, treating it as a gazetted protected area would be us inventing a legal status. There is also an unresolved date: the NCCA says the sulfurous crater lake erupted in 1982, while the record we hold for Mount Malinao puts a minor phreatic explosion at Naglagbong on 29 July 1980. Both are printed because we could not reconcile them. NCCA, Sagisag Kultura, 2015.
Coron, and a claim we took off this pageTiwi is known for coron, handcrafted pottery, and has run an annual Coron Festival since 2006. That one is single-sourced but specific enough to publish. The reason it gets a mention here is the other half: a weaving-and-pottery claim attached loosely to this part of Albay turned up in our research, and nothing we read attaches the weaving to Tiwi. So the pottery stays and the weaving does not, which is the same rule that keeps a whale shark fee off the Donsol page. the Tiwi municipal record.

Services

Getting something done in Tiwi

Twelve of these are handled by the municipal hall and four are national services with offices in Bicol. With no reachable Citizens Charter for Tiwi, 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 Albay
Worth passing on?