Banaue

The Ifugao built these valleys. Terraces cut into slopes of up to fifty degrees, walled with stone and packed earth and watered by channels led from the forest above, cover the mountainsides around Banaue and represent centuries of collective work; how many centuries is debated, with older estimates of two thousand years now challenged by research suggesting that many were built within the last four hundred. Whichever is right, the system is an engineering achievement maintained entirely by the families who farm it.

Spain never controlled Ifugao. Expeditions reached the valleys from the 17th century onward and were repeatedly driven back, and the highlands kept their own law, religion and ritual cycle through the whole colonial period. American administrators, arriving after 1898, built the first roads and schools, mapped the province and brought Protestant and Catholic missions, and Ifugao was organised as part of the Mountain Province.

The Second World War ended nearby: General Tomoyuki Yamashita, having withdrawn into the Cordillera, surrendered at Kiangan in September 1945, and a shrine there marks the site. Banaue itself grew into a market town after the war, and from the 1970s the terraces drew visitors, appearing on Philippine banknotes and in tourism campaigns. In 1995 UNESCO inscribed the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, five clusters in Ifugao including Batad and Bangaan in Banaue, and the site was placed on the list of World Heritage in danger from 2001 to 2012 as abandonment and erosion took their toll. Migration of young people to the cities remains the terraces' central problem.

Ifugao society organised itself around kinship, rice wealth and ritual, with a family's standing resting on its rice land and its ability to sponsor feasts. Priests who chant to ancestors and deities preside over the agricultural cycle, and rice is treated as sacred: granaries hold carved bulul figures that guard the harvest, and rituals mark ploughing, planting and the closing of the fields. Much of this continues alongside Christianity, which most families now profess.

The most celebrated Ifugao tradition is the Hudhud, long chanted epics performed during harvest, at wakes and at other occasions, sung by a lead voice with responses from a chorus; UNESCO proclaimed them in 2001 and added them to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2008. Gongs, wooden shields and woven textiles in red, black and white are used at feasts. Great community feasts confirm the standing of a family that can afford to feed the village for days, and the carved hagabi bench marks the highest rank.

Woodcarving is the town's main craft, with bulul figures, bowls and household objects sold in shops and along the viewpoint road, and weaving continues in the surrounding villages. Visitors are welcome but expected to understand that the terraces are farmland: guides are required for most walks, permission matters, and a small payment is normal for photographs of elders in traditional dress.

About 20,000 people live in the municipality, spread between the town centre and several dozen mountain barangays, some an hour or more from a road. The town is the administrative and market centre for the surrounding valleys and has the schools, the hospital and the transport that the villages lack.

Life still turns on rice. Households farm terraces inherited through families, growing tinawon, an heirloom variety harvested once a year, alongside sweet potato, taro and vegetables, and keeping pigs and chickens for rituals and feasts. Yields are modest and the labour is heavy, so many families also depend on remittances from relatives working in Manila or abroad, on woodcarving and weaving, and on the tourist trade of guiding, transport and lodging.

The pattern of the year is fixed by the fields: repairing walls and channels in the dry months, planting from around December, weeding, then harvest in the middle of the year with communal labour and feasting. Mornings begin in mist and cold, with vehicles leaving the terminal early; afternoons often bring rain. The recurring worries are landslides, the cost of maintaining terrace walls, and the steady departure of young people, which leaves fields untended and the whole landscape harder to keep.

Rice is the centre of everything. The heirloom tinawon grown in the terraces is harvested once a year and reserved for celebrations and ritual, while cheaper lowland rice fills out the everyday table; red and purple upland varieties appear in the market. Rice is also fermented into bayah, the rice wine served at feasts and ceremonies and offered to guests.

Mountain cooking is plain and warming. Pork and chicken are stewed or grilled, and pinikpikan, a Cordillera chicken broth with salted pork called etag, is the best-known regional dish, though the traditional method of preparing the bird is now often replaced by ordinary slaughter. Freshwater fish, snails and frogs from the flooded terraces are eaten in season, alongside sweet potato, taro, squash, beans and the tender fern tips known as pako, dressed as a salad with tomato and onion.

Coffee has become an Ifugao product in its own right: arabica grows well at this altitude, is roasted in small batches and sold in town. Otherwise the market supplies what the mountains give — root crops, heirloom rice, bundles of vegetables, dried meat and, at the roadside, the sweet rice cakes and boiled maize eaten by anyone waiting for a jeepney.