Mayon Volcano
Interesting facts
- Mayon's name comes from the Bicolano legend of Daragang Magayon, the 'beautiful lady', from whose burial ground with her lover Panganoron the volcano is said to have grown.
- Its longest uninterrupted eruption began on 23 June 1897 and lasted seven days, killing more than 400 people.
- In 1897 lava ran about 11 kilometres to the east and buried the town of Bacacay under some 15 metres of lava.
- The summit stands about 2,463 metres high, rising from the shore of Albay Gulf only about 10 kilometres away.
- In 1938 Mayon and its surroundings became the Philippines' first national park, later reclassified as Mayon Volcano Natural Park in 2000.
- The first recorded climb to the summit was made in 1858 by two Scots, Paton and Stewart.
- Pyroclastic flows in the 1993 eruption killed 79 people, most of them farmers, and some 50,000 residents had to be evacuated.
- During the 2018 eruption Mayon threw up lava fountains reaching 300 to 500 metres into the air.
- The volcano is built mainly of basaltic andesite, laid down by layer upon layer of lava flows and ash.
Why it is worth it
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 — making Mayon, by that measure, the most symmetrical large volcano on the planet. It's the kind of fact that sounds like tourist-brochure exaggeration until you see the underlying measurements.
That perfect shape comes from a violent and extremely frequent history. Mayon has erupted at least 50 times since records began in 1616, and independent counts pushing the total number of eruptions since antiquity to nearly 70, giving it one of the shortest average intervals between eruptions of any volcano on Earth — roughly once every eight years across four centuries of record-keeping. Its most catastrophic eruption came in 1814, when a pyroclastic surge buried the town of Cagsawa, including the town's stone church, killing more than 1,200 people; the ruined bell tower of that church, half-swallowed by centuries of subsequent ash falls, still stands as the region's most visible monument to the disaster.
The volcano's continuing activity is not a historical footnote — it's a live risk shared by an enormous number of people, since roughly a million people now live within 30 kilometres of the summit, and the city of Legazpi sits barely 13 kilometres from the crater, making the slopes around Mayon among the most densely populated volcanic hazard zones anywhere in the world.
Getting there
9 km from Malilipot. Bicol International Airport (DRP) is about 16 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Mayon, also known as Mount Mayon and Mayon Volcano, is an active stratovolcano in the province of Albay in Bicol, Philippines. A popular tourist destination, it is renowned for its "perfect cone" owing to its symmetric conical shape, and is regarded as sacred in Philippine mythology.
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