Tagaytay

The ridge above Taal Lake was farmland and forest on the edge of Cavite for most of its history, with settlements clustered below rather than on the exposed crest. The caldera below has shaped everything: Taal has erupted dozens of times in recorded history, and the great eruption of 1754 buried and moved several lakeside towns, including Taal itself, which was rebuilt on higher ground to the south-west.

Tagaytay was carved out of neighbouring municipalities and chartered as a city in 1938, shortly after American planners identified the ridge as a healthy, cool site within reach of the capital. During the Second World War its position above the lake made it strategically useful: American paratroopers landed on the ridge in February 1945 as part of the operation to retake Manila from the south.

After the war the town grew slowly as a place for rest houses and retreats, with religious orders building seminaries and convents along the crest for the same reason the Americans chose it — cool air and quiet. The People's Park in the Sky on Mount Sungay was begun in the 1980s as a state guest house for a visiting American president, abandoned unfinished, and later opened to the public. From the 1990s the improvement of the roads from Manila turned Tagaytay into a weekend destination, and hotels, condominiums and restaurants filled the ridge. The 2020 eruption of Taal covered the area in ash, forced evacuations and closed businesses for months, and recovery from it, along with the pressure of weekend traffic, dominates local debate.

Tagaytay's culture is Tagalog and Catholic, shaped by its position between the old Cavite towns and the Batangas lake country. It has an unusual concentration of seminaries, convents and retreat houses, drawn by the climate and quiet, and a steady traffic of pilgrims and church groups on retreats gives the ridge a quality quite separate from its restaurants. Holy Week is busy with visitors making the round of churches.

The town's identity is bound to the view and to the weekend. Families from Manila have come up for generations to escape the heat, eat bulalo and look at the volcano, and the rhythm of the week is inverted: quiet from Monday to Thursday, then full. That has created a service economy where much of the workforce commutes from the surrounding towns, and a local pride in the view itself, which is treated as a shared asset to be protected from building.

Caviteño traditions persist in the barangays away from the ridge: town fiestas with processions and brass bands, harvest customs from the pineapple and coffee farms, and the Tagalog manners found across the region — 'po' and 'opo' when speaking to elders, the mano gesture of touching an elder's hand to the forehead, and a strong obligation to feed guests. The volcano is part of local memory rather than a spectacle: most families here have relatives among those evacuated in 2020, and eruptions are spoken of practically.

About 88,000 people live in Tagaytay, a small population for a place that draws weekend crowds from the capital. Most live in the barangays spread along and below the ridge rather than on the crest itself, where land has largely been bought for hotels, restaurants and condominiums.

Tourism is the economy. Hotels, restaurants, cafés, resorts and the souvenir and fruit trade employ most of the workforce, supplemented by people who travel in daily from Mendez, Alfonso, Silang and the Batangas towns. Farming continues on the slopes behind the ridge — pineapples, coffee, vegetables and cut flowers — and fish farming on the lake below supplies Manila's markets with tilapia and bangus.

The week runs to the visitor calendar. Midweek the ridge is calm and local, markets busy in the morning and quiet by afternoon; on Friday the traffic arrives and the restaurants fill until late. Water supply, waste and the pressure of construction on the caldera rim are recurring public issues, along with the state of Taal itself, whose alert level determines whether the lakeside towns below can work at all. Mornings are cold enough for jackets, and the mist that rolls over the ridge by mid-afternoon is part of the town's daily pattern.

Bulalo is the dish that defines the town: beef shanks and marrow bones simmered for hours with corn, cabbage and pechay into a clear, fatty broth, eaten steaming in the cool air. It comes from Batangas cattle country below the ridge, and whole restaurants exist to serve nothing else, along with the stalls at the back of the beef market where it is cheapest and often best.

The lake supplies the other specialities. Tawilis, a freshwater sardine found nowhere else in the world, is fried until crisp and eaten whole with a vinegar and chilli dip; tilapia and milkfish from the pens come grilled, fried or stuffed. Batangas cooking adds lomi, a thick noodle soup with meat and vegetables eaten at roadside stalls, and goto and arroz caldo, rice porridges that suit the climate.

Coffee is a local product: kapeng barako, made from the liberica bean grown on the Cavite and Batangas uplands, is strong, aromatic and traditionally drunk black with sugar. The farms behind the ridge also grow pineapples and coconuts, so buko pie — a pale custard pie of young coconut — is sold from stands along the road and taken back to Manila by the boxful, together with cashew tarts, suman rice rolls and bottled coffee. Sweetcorn boiled or grilled at the roadside and hot taho on cold mornings complete the ridge's informal menu.