Sagada

Sagada sits in Kankanaey country, high in the limestone belt of the western Cordillera, and its earliest history is written in its caves: wooden coffins stacked in rock shelters and fixed to cliffs, a burial practice that in some families continued into recent generations. Spain never brought the area under firm control, and the settlement remained a cluster of wards with their own customary law, irrigated terraces and ritual grounds.

The change came with American rule. Episcopal missionaries arrived in the first years of the 20th century, and under the priest John Staunton the mission built the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin and founded St Mary's School in 1904, introduced new trades and made Sagada one of the strongholds of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines — which is why the town's older buildings are stone-walled and mission-plain rather than Spanish colonial. A road eventually linked it to Bontoc and, over the mountains, to Baguio.

For much of the 20th century Sagada was remote and little visited. Backpackers found it from the 1970s, drawn by the caves and the cool air, and it grew slowly into one of the best-known destinations in the Cordillera; a Filipino romantic comedy filmed here, released in 2014 and given a wide cinema run the following year, brought a further surge of domestic visitors. The municipality has since had to balance that traffic against its water supply, its waste and the privacy of its burial sites, regulating guides through the tourism office and limiting access to some places.

The people of Sagada are Kankanaey, one of the Cordillera peoples who kept their own institutions through the Spanish period. Wards retain customary community grounds, and rituals tied to the rice cycle are still called at planting and harvest, with rest days on which work in the fields stops and outsiders are asked to stay clear. Elders' councils continue to settle local matters alongside the municipal government.

Christianity, in its Episcopalian form, sits alongside all this rather than replacing it. Church weddings and funerals follow older mourning customs, and on All Saints' Day families climb to the cemetery on Calvary Hill and light fires of resinous pine wood on the graves, filling the ridge with smoke. Death customs are the town's best-known feature and its most sensitive: the hanging coffins are family graves, and guides set the rules about approach and photography.

Weaving on backstrap and pedal looms produces the striped and geometric cloth used for bags, blankets and clothing, and is one of the town's older trades. Music at gatherings uses flat gongs and drums, and dancing is done in the round at weddings and feasts. The atmosphere the town is known for — quiet evenings, early nights, mist, coffee and woodsmoke — is partly enforced: local rules restrict late-night noise, and the town has long discouraged the loud bar culture found in other destinations.

About 11,000 people live in the municipality, spread across barangays that run from the Poblacion down steep valleys to farming hamlets such as Fidelisan, Aguid and Ambasing. Farming remains the base of the economy: irrigated rice in terraces, along with vegetables, root crops and arabica coffee grown on the slopes, much of it sold through Bontoc and Baguio.

Tourism is the other pillar, and it has reshaped the Poblacion into a street of guesthouses, cafés and craft shops where guides register and visitors sign in. The work is seasonal, peaking at Christmas, Holy Week and long weekends, when the town's small water system and narrow roads come under pressure — a recurring subject of local debate, along with waste management and proposals to cap visitor numbers. Younger residents often leave for Baguio, Manila or work abroad, and send money back.

Days start early and end early. Mornings are for fields, school and the market; afternoons cloud over and often rain; by nine in the evening the streets are quiet. Sundays are church days for much of the town. Nights are cold enough for blankets and fires year-round, a novelty in a tropical country and a large part of why Filipinos come.

Cordillera cooking here is plain, smoky and built on what the slopes produce. Pinikpikan is the dish most associated with the mountains, a chicken soup traditionally prepared in a ritual manner and flavoured with etag — pork salted and smoked for months, whose strong taste also seasons vegetable dishes and soups. Heirloom highland rice, often red or purple-grained, is grown in the valley terraces and sold by the sack in the market.

Vegetables dominate the everyday table: beans, squash, chayote, cabbage and sweet potato, cooked simply and eaten with rice. Wild berries and fruit appear seasonally, and the local arabica, grown on surrounding farms and roasted in town, is served in almost every café — Sagada coffee is one of the region's better-known products. Tapuy, rice wine, is drunk at celebrations and rituals rather than casually.

The town has also acquired a set of visitor foods that locals now make as well as anyone: yoghurt with fruit and honey, made in guesthouse kitchens, and a sharp lemon meringue pie that has become the thing people carry home. Bakeries in the Poblacion sell it alongside the pies and breads of ordinary Philippine bakery culture, and small eateries serve rice meals of grilled pork, vegetables and broth from late morning until early evening.