Type of early Filipino settlement.
The term was derived from balangay , the sailboats that brought Malay settlers to the Philippines from Borneo. Each boat carried a family group that established a village. These villages, which sometimes grew to include 30100 families, remained isolated from one another; the fact that no larger political grouping emerged (except on Mindanao) facilitated the 16th-century Spanish conquest. The Spanish retained the barangay as a unit of local administration.