A set of photos posted on Facebook today, 12th October 2026, by content creator Johnny Khooo highlights the interesting gulf between the seemingly “First World” vibe of the tony district known as the “Bonifacio Global City” (BGC) and the organic indigenous Filipino communities surrounding this enclave. A series of photos posted by Khooo illustrate the “discovery” of a portal linking BGC and the South Cembo community native to the area.
[NB: The next four photos that follow credited to Johnny Khooo. Annotations in yellow were added by the author of this post]
The first photo features an inconspicuous opening (A) along a BGC perimeter wall adjacent to its 7th Avenue that is evidently meant to block pedestrian level line-of-sight to whatever lies on its other side and, possibly, to control personnel access.
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Beyond this opening is a corridor (B) through which workers who (presumably) work for various community, household and business services within BGC come and go. Note the security gate (B.1) leading to the other end of this corridor. This is likely closed and locked after a certain time of the day (and opened presumably before the start of a work day) for security reasons. At its core, BGC remains, after all, an affluent — and, therefore, gated — comnmunity.
A picture starkly different from chi chi BGC greets the pedestrian on the other side of this security gate (C). Note the black SUV (C.1) which seems consistent with the vehicle at the end of the corridor and beyond the gate of corridor B in the second photo (slightly obscured by the pedestrian in the photo).
Do a 180-degree turn from the view in the third photo and one can then observe a sight familiar to most ordinary Filipinos. It appears to be a street in the district of South Cembo.
A street map of the border between BGC and South Cembo reveals what may likely be the exact location of this portal indicating that it lies where native street J.P. Rizal would have intersected with BGC’s “7th Avenue” had this wall not existed.
The only real surprising thing about this portal between the Philippines’ First World terrarium and the native organic reality that surrounds it is the lack of armed security guards and, perhaps, watch towers — sort of like that other wall on the other side of the world that divided Berlin back in the good ol’ Cold War days. Then again, it is worth noting how this modern-day wall — flimsy as it is compared to its Cold War counterpart in Germany — still comes across as deliberately designed to mask the other side.
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