The Most Beautiful Places in the Philippines
15 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in the Philippines are Taal Volcano, Chocolate Hills and Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. The list covers 15 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The Philippines sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where oceanic plates dive beneath the archipelago, and that single fact explains much of its scenery: young volcanoes, crater lakes, hot springs and mountains that rise straight from the sea. Warm seas around more than seven thousand islands built some of the richest coral reefs on Earth, while tropical rain dissolved uplifted limestone into caves, underground rivers and strange karst hills. On top of the land sits a layered human story, from rice terraces carved by mountain communities to the fortress-like churches of the Spanish colonial era.
Taal Volcano is a volcano inside a lake, with its own crater lake on the island at its centre, and Mayon in Albay is famous for one of the most symmetrical cones of any volcano. Lake Pinatubo is much younger: it filled the summit caldera left by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. On Bohol, the Chocolate Hills are a field of more than a thousand grassy limestone mounds, and in Palawan the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River runs for kilometres under a karst mountain before meeting the sea.
Human work is just as distinctive. The Banaue Rice Terraces, cut into the Ifugao mountains by hand, climb whole valleys, and Paoay Church in Ilocos Norte leans on enormous brick buttresses, a style known as earthquake baroque. Out in the Sulu Sea, Tubbataha Reef is a remote pair of atolls protected as a marine park, while Kawasan Falls on Cebu pours into turquoise pools.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taal Volcano | Volcano | |
| 2 | Chocolate Hills | Rock formation | |
| 3 | Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park | Show cave | ✓ |
| 4 | Tubbataha Reef | Coral reef | ✓ |
| 5 | Paoay Church | Church building | ✓ |
| 6 | Banaue Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | |
| 7 | Mount Pulag | Mountain | |
| 8 | Mayon Volcano | Volcano | |
| 9 | Miagao Church | Fortified church | ✓ |
| 10 | Lake Pinatubo | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 11 | Kawasan Falls | Waterfall | |
| 12 | Hinatuan Enchanted River | River | |
| 13 | Asik-Asik Falls | Waterfall | |
| 14 | Kayangan Lake | Lake | |
| 15 | Hanging Coffins of Sagada | Cemetery |
01 Taal Volcano
Philippines · 25.4 km from Batangas City14.010° N 120.998° E
Image by marcparraphoto from Pixabay Taal Volcano is a landscape of nested craters: a huge caldera flooded by Taal Lake, an island volcano rising from the lake, and on that island a crater lake with a small rocky islet of its own, Vulcan Point.
Did you know? The 1911 eruption was heard across an area more than 600 miles wide, and Volcano Island sank by one to three metres.
02 Chocolate Hills
Philippines9.917° N 124.167° E
P199 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Chocolate Hills are one of the strangest landscapes in Southeast Asia: well over a thousand rounded, almost identical grassy mounds spread across the interior of Bohol island, like a field of giant haycocks or upturned bowls.
Did you know? The grass that turns brown each dry season is dominated by cogon grass and wild sugarcane.
03 Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park
Philippines10.167° N 118.917° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Mike Gonzalez · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park, on the west coast of Palawan, protects a river that disappears into a mountain and reaches the sea through a cave.
Did you know? Researchers have recorded around 30 mammal species, 19 reptiles, of which 8 are endemic, and 10 amphibians within the park.
More about Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park →
04 Tubbataha Reef
Philippines8.953° N 119.868° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Anna Varona · CC BY 4.0 Tubbataha sits in the middle of the Sulu Sea, about 150 km southeast of Puerto Princesa, with nothing around it but open water. The protected area spans roughly 970 km² and takes in two large atolls, the North and South Atolls, and the smaller Jessie Beazley Reef some 20 km to the north.
Did you know? Surveys have recorded 11 shark species, 13 species of whales and dolphins, and about 100 bird species in and around the park.
05 Paoay Church
Philippines · 17 km from Laoag18.061° N 120.522° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
CharMel Creations · CC BY-SA 4.0 The church of St Augustine in Paoay, in Ilocos Norte on the northwest coast of Luzon, is the clearest example of what Filipinos call earthquake Baroque: the European Baroque church, built heavy and low to survive a land that shakes.
Did you know? It is said that the bell tower's bell rang louder and longer at the weddings of prominent clans than at those of poorer families.
06 Banaue Rice Terraces
Philippines16.935° N 121.135° E
Image by lester56 from Pixabay The terraces of Banaue climb the walls of a deep valley in the Cordillera of northern Luzon, around 1,500 metres above sea level, in flight after flight of narrow paddies that follow every fold of the mountainside.
Did you know? The final harvest rites include tungul, a day of rest on which any agricultural work is strictly taboo.
07 Mount Pulag
Philippines · 37.6 km from Baguio16.584° N 120.884° E
Benedict Kwok · CC BY-SA 3.0 At dawn on the summit of Mount Pulag, the grassy crest often stands above a flat white plain of cloud that fills the valleys of northern Luzon from horizon to horizon.
Did you know? August is the wettest month on the mountain, with an average of about 1,135 millimetres of rain.
08 Mayon Volcano
Philippines · 11.9 km from Legazpi13.257° N 123.685° E
Image by matthewebriega2018 from Pixabay Mayon's cone is close to a geometric ideal, and volcanologists have actually put a number on how close: measuring the deviation of its slopes from a perfect cone, researchers have found an average departure of just over a metre against a typical average deviation of more than 21 metres for stratovolcanoes generally…
Did you know? The summit stands about 2,463 metres high, rising from the shore of Albay Gulf only about 10 kilometres away.
09 Miagao Church
Philippines · 34.6 km from Iloilo City10.642° N 122.235° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Nickrds09 · CC BY-SA 3.0 In the coastal town of Miagao, on the southern shore of Panay, stands a church that is half cathedral, half fortress.
Did you know? Before gaining its own parish, Miagao was served by visiting priests from Oton, Tigbauan, San Joaquín and Guimbal in turn.
10 Lake Pinatubo
Philippines · 21 km from Angeles15.130° N 120.350° E
Andre Lloyd Torres · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lake Pinatubo fills the crater left by one of the most violent eruptions of the 20th century.
Did you know? The lake is fed only by rain falling on a catchment of about 5 km², and its overflow drains into the Bucao River.
11 Kawasan Falls
Philippines9.802° N 123.374° E
Andrewhaimerl · CC BY 4.0 Kawasan Falls is a cascade in the forested hills of south-western Cebu, in the municipality of Badian, and its fame rests on one thing above all: the colour of its water. Fed by mountain springs, the stream runs clear turquoise, a colour that looks almost artificial against the green of the jungle.
Did you know? The Matutinao River won the Cleanest and Greenest River award several times and entered that contest's Hall of Fame in 2003.
12 Hinatuan Enchanted River
Philippines8.457° N 126.360° E
2il org · CC BY 2.0 At the edge of the Philippine Sea coast of Mindanao, a short river wells up from a deep spring and runs for only about 270 metres before meeting Hinatuan Bay.
Did you know? The spring pushes out so much water that divers time their entries for high slack tide, when rising seawater slows the outflow from the cave.
13 Asik-Asik Falls
Philippines7.561° N 124.535° E
Jyppe A. Quidores · CC BY-SA 4.0 Asik-Asik Falls looks less like a waterfall than a wall that is quietly leaking. Instead of a river pouring over a lip, hundreds of separate threads of water burst straight out of the fissures of a cliff about 60 m high and some 140 m wide, running down through a dense coat of ferns and moss.
Did you know? Some local people believe the spring water pouring from the cliff has healing properties, a belief that drew many of the earliest visitors.
14 Kayangan Lake
Philippines11.957° N 120.226° E
Myles Kadusale · CC BY 3.0 Kayangan Lake fills a hollow among the limestone walls of Coron Island, in the far north of Palawan, and it owes its fame to water so clear that from the surface you can follow the rock ledges and the slim shapes of garfish many metres down.
Did you know? Kayangan was named the cleanest inland body of water in the Philippines three years running, from 1997 to 1999, earning a place in the presidential hall of fame.
15 Hanging Coffins of Sagada
Philippines17.081° N 120.906° E
Aldrin J. Garces (ag) · CC BY-SA 3.0 High on the limestone walls of Echo Valley, in the mountains of northern Luzon, wooden coffins are fixed to the rock: resting on ledges, wedged into crevices or laid on beams driven into the cliff face, some of them stacked one above another.
Did you know? Traditionally only elders who had married and had grandchildren were considered for this form of burial.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in the Philippines?
- On our list, Taal Volcano ranks first, followed by Chocolate Hills and Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park.
- Why does the Philippines have so many volcanoes?
- The archipelago lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the Philippine Sea Plate and other plates are pushed beneath it along deep ocean trenches. Melting at depth feeds a chain of volcanoes such as Mayon, Taal and Pinatubo, several of which have erupted in modern times.
- What are the Chocolate Hills made of?
- The Chocolate Hills of Bohol are cone-shaped mounds of marine limestone, shaped by rain and erosion over a very long time. They are covered in grass that dries and turns brown in the dry season, which gave them their name.
- How was Lake Pinatubo formed?
- The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, one of the largest of the twentieth century, collapsed the summit into a caldera. Rainwater filled the hollow over the following years, creating the crater lake seen today.
- What kinds of places are there to see in the Philippines?
- In our collection, the places in the Philippines are most often mountains (2), volcanoes (2), waterfalls (2) and summits (1).
- How many places are on this list in the Philippines?
- The list covers 15 places.