The eighth wonder of the world — 2,000-year-old Ifugao rice terraces hand-carved into the Cordillera
Banaue is a municipality in Ifugao province in the northern Luzon Cordillera mountains, home to the Banaue Rice Terraces — a 2,000-year-old system of hand-carved rice paddies that climb the mountain slopes up to 1,500 metres, following the contours of the hillside so precisely that placed end to end they would circle half the globe. Built by the Ifugao indigenous people without metal tools, the terraces are irrigated by a still-functioning ancient system of clay pipes and bamboo tubes drawing water from the forests above. The nearby village of Batad sits inside an amphitheatre of terraces so…
The Ifugao rice terraces have been continuously cultivated for at least 2,000 years, making them one of the oldest agricultural systems in the world. The Ifugao people, who resisted Spanish colonisation more successfully than most lowland Filipino groups, developed not just the terraces but a complex legal, spiritual, and agricultural knowledge system; the private forest plots (muyong) that feed water to the terraces are still governed by customary Ifugao law. UNESCO inscribed the Cordillera Rice Terraces as a World Heritage Site in 1995 and added them to the endangered list in 2001 due to de…