Nustar Boardwalk

The boardwalk runs along Cebu City’s South Road Properties waterfront, the reclaimed strip of coastline the city has been filling and developing since the 1990s, directly below NUSTAR Resort. It’s a public promenade rather than a resort amenity — open to anyone walking, running, or watching the channel traffic, whether or not you’re a guest next door.

• The paved walkway runs along the Mactan Channel with an open sightline to the water and passing inter-island traffic.
• Restaurants and cafes along the boardwalk range from casual to the resort’s own dining outlets, so budgets and dress codes vary block to block.
• Early evening draws the largest crowd, timed to the sunset over the channel before the resort’s lighting takes over after dark.

NUSTAR opened on May 8, 2022, as Cebu’s first integrated casino resort, part of a wider push to build out the city’s MICE and leisure economy on land that didn’t exist a generation ago. The boardwalk is the public-facing edge of that reclamation — worth a walk even if the resort itself isn’t on your itinerary.

South Road Properties itself is the larger story the boardwalk sits inside. Cebu City has been reclaiming this stretch of coastline since the 1990s, turning open water into a roughly 300-hectare development zone meant to give the city room to grow that its dense historic downtown could no longer provide. NUSTAR is the most visible single project on that reclaimed land so far, but the boardwalk’s public status is arguably the more consequential planning decision — a private resort development that still had to leave its waterfront edge open and walkable rather than gating it off entirely, which isn’t a given on reclaimed land developed at this scale.

Restaurants and cafes along the walk cover a wide range: casual food-and-drink kiosks aimed at the evening walking and jogging crowd, mid-tier restaurants with outdoor seating facing the channel, and the resort’s own dining outlets at the pricier end for anyone stepping over from NUSTAR proper. Budgets and dress codes shift noticeably block to block, so it’s worth scanning a stretch before committing to a table if cost matters.

Reclaimed coastline carries real environmental trade-offs worth naming rather than glossing over — filled land changes local water circulation and buries what was previously open sea floor, and reclamation projects in general raise long-term subsidence and flood-management questions that outlast any single development built on top of them. None of that is unique to NUSTAR’s stretch of SRP, but it’s the honest context behind a waterfront promenade that, from the boardwalk itself, looks like straightforward city planning done well. What the public gets in return is real: a lit, paved, free waterfront walk with channel views and passing inter-island ferry and cargo traffic, in a city that has comparatively little open public shoreline elsewhere along its downtown coast. Bring a jacket if the wind is up — the open channel-facing stretch catches more breeze than the sheltered streets further inland.

Explore More in Cebu City

• Basilica del Santo Ni\xF1o
• La Vie in the Sky
• 10,000 Roses Café