Baguio’s 29-meter mandala awaits Guinness nod
BAGUIO CITY—A massive crocheted mandala created by a local artist and poised for Guinness World Records recognition has been officially measured at 29.359 meters in diameter, according to engineers tapped by the city government as independent validators.
The measurement, conducted Thursday at a shopping mall here by civil engineers Thadeus Jericho Garcia and Aldrin Balangen, brings avid crocheter Adelaida Guia closer to securing a Guinness category she herself proposed: the world’s largest crocheted mandala made by a single individual.
Guia, 55, first gained attention in 2022 when Inquirer photo correspondent EV Espiritu spotted her displaying her giant mandalas along downtown Session Road. At the time, the city had been closing the main street to traffic every Sunday to help small businesses and artisans recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Guia, who relocated from Manila to Baguio with her family in 2016, became a fixture of the weekly event. Her work soon went viral on social media.
Between May and June this year, the former customer relations officer completed her Guinness entry—the “Wishing Star Mandala”—in full public view at Burnham Park’s Rose Garden.
Garcia and Balangen joined an independent validation team formed by the city government and the Baguio Creative Council. Their task: authenticate Guia’s work. In 2017, Baguio became the first Philippine city to be recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) as a Creative City for Folk Arts and Crafts.
The engineers were joined by retired Saint Louis University professor Constance Dulay-Florentin and mandala expert Genevieve Balance Kupang of Baguio Central University, who also engaged Guia in a public discussion at SM City Baguio.
Kupang, introduced at the event as an “applied cosmic anthropologist,” explained her deep interest in mandalas—intricate geometric figures rooted in Buddhist and Hindu traditions. The Sanskrit word mandala means “circle.”
Circle
The BCU graduate school dean and international affairs officer shared that she had traveled the world for her dissertation on mandalas, discovering that people create them “because of a longing of the human heart to be whole.”
She added that while some cultures produce mandala art, a Buddhist sect in Japan “makes mandala using colored sand [and they] do this in silence as a form of meditation.”
According to Kupang, most practitioners use mandalas “to form a connection with nature,” and “to give peace to all corners of the world, especially war-torn nations.”
Guia acknowledged the spiritual dimension of her work but admitted that her inspiration came from American crochet artist Helen Shrimpton, who taught the craft online.
Her “Wishing Star” captivated mallgoers, displayed alongside crochet knickknacks crafted by her children for their small business, “Abiakak”—a playful reversal of the Filipino word kakaiba (unusual).
To demonstrate its size, Guia was joined by 18 volunteers who laid down across the crocheted piece.
Garcia noted that another team of engineers had already measured the mandala manually a day earlier, on Wednesday, using traditional tools. Their results closely matched the official measurement.
The validation report will be sent to the Guinness Records Office in London.
Guia said she expects to wait up to three months for Guinness to send a representative to conduct its own verification of the “Wishing Star.”
However, she added, “donors can help her pay a fee to speed up that process.”
