José Rizal

Jose Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was a Filipino nationalist, writer and polymath active at the end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines, and he is popularly considered a national hero of the country. His novels and essays criticised colonial rule and helped build the sense of national identity that later fed the independence movement. He was executed in 1896. An ophthalmologist by profession, he became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement in the 1880s, which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain. By the early 1890s, amid the Calamba land dispute, he grew more separatist in his stance.