Although retaining with her a valuable item
called a "Cuaderno" which one writer emphasized that it may be considered as
a historical document, still the precise date of the foundation of Nabua as
a town seemed to raise a problem.
The "Cuaderno", or notebook in the English
language, of Nabua is a collection of narratives that were considered to be
"relayed to, and related by, one generation to another…". This valuable
record was said to originate from the original manuscript of Sr. Alverto
Melos and was "kept by three families who were the Capistranos, the Dineros,
and the Pasadillas".
This "Cuaderno" revealed that the existence
of Nabua as a municipality dates back to as early as 1571 when Fray Alonzo
Jimenez, an Augustinian missionary, started his first Church mission in the
settlement known before as Lupa. The historical marker found in the Church
of Nabua indicates, however, that the town was founded seven years later
from the date it was founded by Fr. Jimenez, which means that it was founded
also in the year 1578.
In 1579, a group of Franciscan missionaries
headed by Fray Pablo de Jesus and Fray Bartolome Ruiz put up a church in a
place known as Antacudos and there they place a big cross. These
missionaries soon merged the villages of Lupa, Antacudos, Sabang and
Binoyoan and became one place which at present is known as the town of Nabua.
The name "Nabua" was originally a longer one spelled as "Naboboa" acquired
from the word "boa" which is "a young embryo of a coconut. The place was
named as this owing to the fact that before the original sitio was shaped
like a "boa".
