From One Piece to Pirates of the Caribbean, the charm of wooden ships shooting gunpowder-powered cannon balls always sails from generation to generation.

With the opening of Museo del Galeon, Manila would no longer just be a layover for tourists in transit to Boracay, Palawan, Siargao and other islands. The museum, claimed to be the world’s first about the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade that spanned for 250 years, cements Manila’s place as a must-visit Philippine destination on its own, thanks to its life-size resin and steel replica of the Espiritu Santo, one of the 181 galleons made in Manila, which comprise 80 percent of the galleons that participated in the galleon trade.

“For a lot of people, that represented Spanish power, but the truth is, 80 percent of them (galleons) were made in the Philippines and sailed by Filipino sailors,” museum managing director Victor Gelano told DAILY TRIBUNE in an exclusive interview.

Now open to the public, Museo del Galeon is ready to welcome children on vacation and upcoming field trips when a new school term unfolds this year. The 9,000-square meter space can surely accommodate busloads of students and can engage both the young and the young-at-heart in its informative and interactive artifacts exhibitions and digital displays that provide a wealth of research and information about the almost 800 recorded voyages that the galleons made to exchange products, faith, ideas, cultures and traditions between Asia, Europe and the Americas from 1565 to 1815.

“We expect 250,000 visitors this year, and we expect 50 percent of them to be students,” Gelano declared.

“As a father of teens myself, it’s so difficult to think of what to do on a weekend outside of malling, so this is a unique attraction,” he said of the museum, whose upper and lower ground entrances are connected to SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City.

Circling the museum is a first-of-its-kind curved oval, a 1,400-square-meter digital display that is the only one of its size and scale in the Philippines, said Gelano.

“The technologies we put into this museum is part of the storytelling,” he shared. “It’s to make the stories more fun and engaging among our younger audience.”

Espiritu Santo, the museum’s centerpiece, is a playground of a ship, retrofitted with wooden furniture recreated by highly-skilled Pampanga woodworks makers. The 40-meter-long and 30-meter-high galleon ship, occupying an area of over 400 sq. meters, gives children and other spectators an idea of how conquistador Ferdinand Magellan’s ship and fleet also might have looked like since the Manila galleons were also patterned after Spanish ships. Since the museum overlooks Manila Bay, the ship seems parked by the shores.

Although traditional-looking outside, the ship has a modern audio-visual projection showing how life inside the galleon might had been. There are also interactive areas like digital panels enabling visitors to design their own galleons and a corner teaching how to do different kinds of sailor’s knots.

Making the ship more realistic are furnished rooms recreating where the ship’s captain and his crewmates might have stayed during voyages. Looking forward, the museum is also exploring the possibility of hosting camping opportunities for children eager for a taste of the galleon trade life.

“There are also other museums with galleon ships, different kinds of ships, but this is the only museum that features a galleon made in the Philippines,” Gelano affirmed.

Of the museum’s two galleries, among the key pieces besides the ship is the tombstone of one of the galleon’s captains, whose son surrendered Manila from the Spanish to the British. In addition to collections from all over the Philippines, the museum would begin institutional partnerships with museums from abroad to loan artifacts.

While the bottom of the ship is now open as an events space, the museum envisions to open an Ocean Learning Center, which would be a place to convene for local and international researchers. The seafaring community, in particular, has a very special relationship with the museum, Gelano said.

“Even before the Spanish arrived, we have a strong seafaring tradition and that continues until today, where we are the most important and largest group of workers at sea,” he said.

More than just an item in tourists’ itineraries, the museum immortalizes part of who Filipinos are as a nation and how we continue to be important in global maritime trade, said Gelano.

“One of the reasons why we’re doing this is because we want to answer part of that question of what it means to be Filipino? And we want to make sure that everyone is very proud and understands this part of our culture and heritage that makes us feel connected to the world.”