Baguio

The plateau was Ibaloi land, grazed and gold-panned long before the city existed, and the small settlement of Kafagway lay where the central park now stands. Spain established a comandancia in the area in the 19th century but never developed it. The Americans did. Looking for a cool station away from lowland heat and disease, they identified the site around 1900, pushed Kennon Road up the gorge at heavy cost in workers' lives, and in 1904 commissioned Daniel Burnham to plan a hill town of parks, civic axes and low buildings on the ridges. Baguio was chartered in 1909 and served as the summer capital of the Philippines, with a presidential residence, a rest camp for the American military and schools that drew families from across the archipelago.

The land deals that created the city dispossessed Ibaloi families, a grievance that has never entirely faded and still surfaces in land cases. In 1945 Baguio was destroyed almost completely: it was bombed heavily during the campaign against Japanese forces holding the Cordillera, and the Japanese surrender in the Philippines was formally signed in the city that September.

Rebuilt through the 1950s, Baguio grew far beyond the plan — universities, a mining and vegetable trade, an export-processing zone and waves of migration from the lowlands and the mountains filled the ridges with houses. The July 1990 Luzon earthquake struck it severely, collapsing hotels and cutting the roads for weeks. Recovery was rapid, and the problem since has been growth itself: traffic, water supply, tree cover and the survival of the original plan are permanent subjects of argument.

Baguio is the meeting place of the Cordillera. Ibaloi and Kankanaey families are the original highland population of the area, joined over a century by Ifugao, Kalinga, Bontoc, Ilocano and lowland migrants, and the result is a city where several languages are heard on one jeepney and Ilocano, Filipino and English do the work of a common tongue. The city holds Cordillera cultural institutions, and highland weaving, carving and gong music are as present here as in the villages, though in an urban setting.

It is also an arts city, unusually so for its size, with a long line of painters, sculptors, writers and musicians drawn by the climate and the cheap rents; galleries, artists' villages and craft workshops are spread across the ridges, and Baguio belongs to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network for crafts and folk art. The student population of its universities keeps cafés, bookshops and small music venues busy through the academic year.

The big public occasion is Panagbenga, the flower festival created in the 1990s partly to lift spirits after the earthquake, which fills February with float parades and street dancing and ends with Session Road given over to a fair. Manners are relaxed and slightly less formal than in the lowlands; the cold is a point of local pride; and residents have a well-known ambivalence about the holiday crowds that both sustain the city and clog it.

About 368,000 people live within the city limits, with many more in the surrounding Benguet towns that function as suburbs, and the population swells at every long weekend. Education is a pillar of the economy — several universities draw students from across the north — alongside government offices, tourism, a long-established electronics export zone at Loakan, and the vegetable and strawberry trade of the La Trinidad valley just over the ridge.

Housing has climbed every available slope. Whole neighbourhoods are stacked on hairpin roads where houses are entered from the roof of the one below, and the city's density, water supply and dwindling pine cover are constant political issues. Traffic in the central business district is severe, and jeepney routes radiating from the market are the daily reality for most residents.

The rhythm is set by the weather and the school calendar. Mornings are clear and cold, afternoons often cloud over and rain, and by evening the mist is in the pines. Students fill the centre on weekdays, lowland visitors on weekends, and the market and the night market beside Burnham Park are where the city mixes. Many families keep links to Benguet villages and return for planting, harvest and rituals.

Baguio's food is the highlands brought to town. Vegetables grown in the Benguet terraces — cabbage, carrots, broccoli, lettuce — arrive daily at the public market, and the strawberries of La Trinidad turn up in jam, wine, ice cream and the taho sold by vendors at the viewpoints, where the usual caramel syrup is replaced by strawberry. Ube, the purple yam, is made into a thick jam that is the city's signature souvenir, sold alongside peanut brittle and lengua de gato biscuits.

Cordillera cooking is served in a small number of restaurants: pinikpikan, a chicken soup flavoured with etag, the salted and smoked pork that gives highland dishes their particular depth, and heirloom red and black rice from the mountain terraces. Ilocano staples are everywhere too — pinakbet, bagnet, longganisa and vinegar-heavy dipping sauces — reflecting the lowland origins of much of the population.

Coffee matters here. Arabica from Benguet and Sagada is roasted in the city and poured in cafés that double as student and artist hangouts, a scene that has grown steadily since the 1990s. In the evening the night market on Harrison Road adds grilled skewers, fishballs and noodle stalls, and the Chinese restaurants of the business district supply noodles and hot soup, which is what the climate asks for most of the year.