Barbosa Is Turning a Siargao Surf Shop Into the Philippines' Best Vinyl Bar

Up the stairs, past the surfboards, into the record shelves

You find Barbosa by going up. The venue sits on the second floor of Stokehouse, a surf shop in General Luna, Siargao, and the owners like it that way. "Being in the centre of town, conveniently, but semi-hidden in plain sight was kind of a perfect situation," says co-founder Chris Alfaro, who also produces and DJs as Free the Robots. Inside, the walls are floor-to-ceiling vinyl: Pilita Corrales next to a battered copy of Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Gal Costa's India near a Sun Ra record somebody clearly loved to death. None of it is decoration. Every sleeve came from somewhere, donated crates from friends and from labels like Innovative Leisure, Ubiquity and Four Flies.

Barbosa opened on April 8, 2023, built by a small crew that reads like a cross-section of the island's two economies. Jay Ru, a Manila DJ who moved to Siargao around 2015, co-founded it with Alfaro. Marie Alice, Ru's partner, handles design. Gabriel Avencana brought the business side, and surfing champions Marama Tokong and Philmar Alipayo, the latter married to actress Andi Eigenmann, came in as shareholders. That mix isn't an accident. "Our hope is to put Siargao on the map... in the realm of music and art and to attract a certain kind of tourist: artists, musicians, craftsmen, chefs, barmen, writers," Ru and Alfaro have said. Siargao built its name on waves. Barbosa is betting the island can hold a second identity without losing the first.

A schedule built around genre, then thrown out

The week has a rhythm. Mondays are Golden Hour, Tuesdays bring Disco Tropico with Dr. Carps, Thursdays are Sala Sessions with Mahal, and Bread and Butter rounds out the week, the flagship night, funkier and more soulful than the rest. Ru DJs across most of it, and he's not precious about sticking to one lane. "I myself love challenges. I like to go all over the place but make it sound cohesive... you're no longer paying attention to genre,” he's said of his own sets. It's a philosophy that only works because the record wall gives him somewhere to go: forty years of soul, disco, hip hop and surf soundtracks within arm's reach of the decks.

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Part of something bigger than one bar

Barbosa didn't start Siargao's music scene, and its founders don't claim to. Ru also co-founded Harana Sabado Nights, a weekly party now running for almost eight years, and the island's real pioneer is Ezzrei, who opened The Hangout hostel back in 2015 with the island's first regular music nights and earned a DJ Mag Watchlist nod for it in July 2026. What Barbosa adds is a fixed, physical home for that history: a room you can point to, a record collection you can dig through sober at 6pm before the DJs even start. Alfaro puts the goal plainly: "My hope is that the progression of Siargao can maintain a level of openness and balance for the benefit of all locals, tourists and residents."

None of this is effortless on a remote island where every record, every speaker part and most of the bar stock arrives by boat or plane. Barbosa doesn't open seven nights a week because it can't, not because it doesn't want to; Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays get curated playlists instead of a DJ booth. Building a scene somewhere the infrastructure wasn't built for one always comes with a tradeoff like that. Three years in, on an island still best known for a wave break, a surf shop's upstairs room with a wall of secondhand vinyl is exactly the kind of stubborn, specific project that makes a scene real instead of theoretical.