Moalboal hillside casita, Cebu

Moalboal sits on the west coast of Cebu, three hours from the city, and its Panagsama shoreline is one of the best-value dive bases in Asia. This casita is on the hillside just above that shoreline: sixty square metres, two bedrooms, one bathroom, concrete construction with a steel-and-tile roof, a tiled veranda, and a small terraced garden of bougainvillea and calamansi. It sits high enough for a breeze and a sea view over the roofs, five hundred metres downhill to the dive shops.

As elsewhere in the Philippines, foreigners buy the building and lease or corporately hold the land, or purchase through a Filipino spouse. Long leases of twenty-five years renewable for twenty-five more are the standard instrument and are registrable against the title. Use an independent Philippine lawyer and insist on a clean, registered title with a current tax declaration — untitled 'tax dec only' land is common and cheap for a reason. Closing costs run around 6–8%.

The water is the whole point. Panagsama's reef drops from waist depth to a sheer wall going down forty metres, close enough that you can snorkel the top of it from the beach. The resident sardine ball — millions of fish moving as one shape — sits over that wall most days, joined by turtles year-round and thresher sharks on the early boats to Malapascua. Pescador Island, a twenty-minute banca ride out, is a protected marine sanctuary with some of the healthiest hard coral in the Visayas.

For sand, White Beach is a ten-minute drive north: a proper stretch of powder-white sand with shallow turquoise water for swimming, backed by resorts and beach bars. Panagsama itself is rocky at the shoreline, which is exactly why the coral survived. The village has dive shops, restaurants running from Filipino grill to Italian and Israeli, a bakery, mini-marts, a pharmacy and an ATM; Moalboal town proper, five minutes inland, has the public market, banks and a health centre.

Cebu's Mactan international airport is three hours by road, with buses from Cebu South Bus Terminal running every half hour. Beyond diving there is canyoneering down the Kawasan waterfalls at Badian, twenty minutes south — the region's signature day out — plus whale-shark watching at Oslob, the Osmeña Peak hike, and Bantayan Island's beaches a day trip north.