Cebu City resounded with shouts of “Viva Pit Senyor” on the penultimate day of the Sinulog festivalon Saturday with throngs of people joining a five-hour procession that escorted a carriage bearing the statue of the Holy Child Jesus, or Santo Niño Jesus, around the city.

Aside from religious devotees, local and foreign tourists, television and movie celebrities and even politicians of all creeds joined the procession that started and ended at the Minor Basilica of the Holy Child, the 16th century church that was supposedly built on the spot where the image of statue was found in 1565.

“Viva” comes from the Spanish “Long Live” while “Pit Senyor” comes from the Cebuano “sangpit sa Senyor” (meaning “call on the Lord”) and they were again the buzzwords in the colorful festivities that began early Saturday when the Holy Child statue also starred in a fluvial parade from Mandaue City.

Coast Guard officials said 65 vessels were registered to join the fluvial parade, but there also 20 to 30 unregistered vessels that joined the sea procession from Mandaue City where images of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Santo Niño stayed overnight.

When the fluvial procession reached Cebu City’s Pier Uno at around 8 a.m., hundreds of devotees where already at hand to release balloons carrying written prayers and escort the Holy Child statue back to the basilica.

Also at hand were several troupes of dancers in addition to the policemen and first aid teams that were deployed around the city to attend to the needs of paraders who brought the images to the basilica for the annual re-enactment of the first Catholic mass in Cebu.

At around 2 p.m., the statue was again the central figure in the procession that covered 6.1 kilometers and involved a throng, many bearing replicas of the Holy Child statue, that is estimated to have reached four million, according to Ricky Ballesteros, executive director of the Sinulog Foundation.

The statue that was paraded around the city was supposedly given to the wife of the local chieftain Humabon by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan after she agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1521.

Magellan would be killed in a fight with local chieftains in the same year, but Spanish conquistadors returned in 1565 and they supposedly found the statue inside a burned wooden box that was left during the 1521 expedition.

After Saturday’s procession, “we’re now ready for the Sinulog,” Ballesteros said, referring to Sunday’s grand parade that will include 40 floats and 42 groups of dancers in varicolored costumes, who will parade around the city in the cadence that gave the festival its name.

“Sinulog” comes from the Cebuano word “sulog” that refers to the back and forth movement of waves, one step forward and two steps back, the same steps that will be used in the grand parade.