Exploring the Banaue rice terraces, Philippines
21.07.2023 - 08:46
/ roughguides.com
/ Kiki Deere
The Banaue rice terraces were once a colourful collage of winding fields that clung onto a mountain-side in Ifugao province in the Philippines . After being almost completely abandoned by the locals, these plantations are now being revived as young farmers return to work on the paddies. While researching the new Rough Guide to the Philippines , Kiki Deere was awestruck by the sheer beauty and functionality of the Banaue rice terraces.
I follow my guide Elvis along a narrow path that snakes its way through verdant scenery. We clamber up a series of little stone steps that precariously jut out of the mountainside. “We’re heading to the viewpoint!” Elvis exclaims in excitement. I am too busy trying to balance along the stairway to avoid an unpleasant fall, and it’s not until we reach the top and I turn around that I realise what surrounds me: an awe-inspiring view of rice terraces that weave around the mountainside like a giant stairway. “If you joined these rice paddies end to end they would reach half way round the earth”, he tells me.
Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, these stone and mud rice terraces delicately trace the contours of the Cordillera Mountains in Northern Luzon, and have been central to the survival of the Ifugao people since pre-colonial Philippines.
This living landscape, with its intricate web of irrigation systems harvesting water from the mist-enveloped mountaintops, reflects a clear mastery in structural techniques and hydraulic engineering that have remained virtually unchanged for over two millennia. The art of maintaining the terraces was passed orally from generation to generation with traditional tribal rituals evoking spirits to protect the paddies. To this day, bulol rice deities are venerated and placed in the fields and granaries in order to bring abundant harvests and protect against malevolent spirits and catastrophe.
“When I was seven I would head to the paddies with my grandfather. He would teach me how to repair the dikes, flatten the area. I rode the buffalo which would play like a dog sometimes; run back and forth, roll down…” Elvis’s voice is filled with warmth as he recounts his childhood experiences, and I sense a twinge of nostalgia for those carefree boyhood days spent working in the fields.
“The rice that we harvest here in Ifugao is only for personal consumption but sometimes it’s not enough. On average, an Ifugao family has five children, plus the parents. That’s a total of seven mouths to feed. And we eat rice three times a day.”
Rice terraces in the Philippines. Rice cultivation in the North of the Philippines, Batad, Banaue © Tommy Brtek/Shutterstock
The average Filipino consumes over 120kg of rice a year. Commercial rice, as it is known up