Pinili

Pinili was once a forested hilly part of the towns of Paoay, Badoc, and Batac. Pinili is both a Tagalog and Ilokano word for 'chosen'.^[6]

The then vicar of the Philippine Revolution^{[citation needed]}, Gregorio Aglipay, and his Sandataan guerrilla chose the thickly forested hilly area of Pinili as the location for their last stand against the advancing American troops tasked to subdue President Emilio Aguinaldo and his followers. It is said that it was Aglipay himself who selected the name Pinili, but in fact it was the area's elders themselves who chose to unite and be one municipality after the Philippine–American War for unity and closer cooperation.^[7]

Pinili was made an independent town on January 20, 1920, after then Governor General Francis Burton Harrison signed Executive Order No. 92 on December 20, 1919. Felipe Arcangel was appointed by townmate Aglipay as the first town chief executive.

During the Japanese occupation in the 1940s, bolomen from the town, headed by Mariano Gamatero, with three subordinate officers ranked major, Agustin Cabie, Cecilio Vermudez, and Florencio Tacub, fought guerrilla warfare using tactics that included ambuscades, sabotage, raids, petty warfare, hit-and-run tactics, and mobility, to fight the larger-but-less-mobile Japanese troops.

On January 1, 2020, Pinili's history was re-enacted at the town square after a Thanksgiving Mass in Kullabeng, the site where Aglipay used to meet up with elders of the area before it became a town. It was also there where Aglipay, then no longer a Catholic, celebrated what was to be called the first Aglipayan Mass.

Pinili is situated 38.52 kilometres (23.94 mi) from the provincial capital Laoag, and 453.15 kilometres (281.57 mi) from the country's capital city of Manila.

In the 2024 census, the population of Pinili was 17,705 people,^[15] with a density of 200 inhabitants per square kilometre or 520 inhabitants per square mile.

Poverty incidence of Pinili

Source: Philippine Statistics Authority^{[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]}

The Pinili Schools District Office governs all public and private elementary and high schools within the municipality.^[25]