In 1570, the conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legaspi granted the Augustinian order its first friar estate or estancia, located in the Banilad-Talamban area, totaling 1,925 hectares. By the late 18^th century, the order’s landholdings in Cebu had expanded to include both settled as well as uncultivated lands in Talisay and Minglanilla totaling 8,020 hectares. The Jesuits also had a small piece of land that today continues to bear the name Estancia (in Mandaue), comprising a ranch bordering the Augustinian estate of Banilad. This was later acquired by the Augustinians, which consolidated all their landholdings, planted to sugar cane, corn and tobacco, into the Sociedad Agricola de Ultramar in 1894.

While a few of the friar lands were acquired as part of indulgences in the form of donations, most of these came from outright confiscations from landholdings of the native elite, causing at least one native uprising, that of the 1589 revolt in the town of San Nicolas. Eventually, friar lands became one of the major issues that sparked the Philippine revolution.

The American colonial administration finally put the issue to rest on December 1903, Governor General Howard Taft bought 410,000 acres of friar lands in Luzon for P14, 478,000. The following year, the colonial government acquired the Augustinian landholdings in Cebu for P1, 319,986.48. These were then sold to the public in small parcels.

- Ybarra