Banaue Rice Terraces
Interesting facts
- Archaeological dating by the Ifugao Archaeological Project suggests the terraces were built only about 400 to 500 years ago, during Spanish colonial pressure on the lowlands.
- The terraces were built with minimal tools, largely by hand, their walls raised from stone and rammed earth and fed by a canal at the top.
- Giant earthworms, known in Ifugao as olang, burrow through the terrace walls and are blamed for collapses, along with rats and snails.
- The final harvest rites include tungul, a day of rest on which any agricultural work is strictly taboo.
- Harvest thanksgiving feasts are marked with bayah rice wine, rice cakes and betel nut.
- In March 2009 the Ifugao rice terraces were formally declared free of genetically modified organisms.
- The terraces appeared on the reverse of the 1,000-peso note from 1991 to 2018 and on the 20-peso note printed from 2010.
- The anthropologist Otley Beyer's estimate of over 2,000 years long dominated, but radiocarbon and plant remains have since pointed to a far younger age.
Why it is worth it
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. There is no single plan and no straight line: each terrace keeps to the contour of the slope, so that whole hillsides look as if they have been drawn over with a fine pen. In the planting season the paddies hold sheets of water that mirror the sky; as the rice grows they turn a vivid green, and before harvest they fade to gold.
They were built and are still worked by the Ifugao, and the extraordinary thing about them is that they are a living system rather than a ruin. Water is gathered in the rainforest on the ridges above and led down through a network of channels from one paddy to the next, so that the forest, the terraces and the villages form a single landscape that only works as long as all three are tended. Rice farming here is bound up with an elaborate cycle of rituals and celebrations tied to the agricultural year. How old the terraces are is still debated: an early estimate by the anthropologist Otley Beyer put them at more than two thousand years, but several researchers argue that they were built far more recently. The Philippine government declared them a National Cultural Treasure in 1973, and they have appeared on the country's banknotes.
The classic panorama is from the main viewpoint above the town, about five kilometres from the centre, where the terraces fall away below the road in a broad sweep of curves. The terraces closest to town have been crowded by modern houses and roads, which is why they were left out when UNESCO inscribed the rice terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras in 1995; the inscribed clusters include Batad and Bangaan within the same municipality, and Batad in particular, a ring of terraces wrapped round a natural amphitheatre, is the walk most visitors make after seeing the view.
Getting there
Banaue is a small mountain town in Ifugao province, about 15 km from the provincial capital, Lagawe. The nearest airport is Cauayan (CYZ) in the Cagayan Valley, about 66 km away by air and further by mountain road. Most travellers come by overnight bus from Manila, a journey of about nine hours; from Banaue, local transport reaches the viewpoint and the trailheads for Batad and the other terrace villages.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Banaue Rice Terraces are terraces that were carved into the mountains of Banaue, Ifugao, in the Philippines, by the ancestors of the Igorot people. The terraces were built with minimal equipment, largely by hand. The terraces are located approximately 1,500 meters above sea level. These are fed by an ancient irrigation system from the rainforests above the terraces.
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