The Banaue Rice Terraces are one of the awesome destinations of the Philippines located about 1500 meters above the sea level and stretches over 10,360 square kilometers of ridge. It is approximately 9 hours journey from Manila, the capital of Philippines, if you travel by bus. The other name of 2000-year old Banaue Rice Terraces is Payew.
Visitors crowd over this place to have a glimpse of its natural beauty and grandeur that is believed to be carved out by Ifugao tribes from hillside with minimal equipments possible to grant level steps for rice plantation. Banaue Rice Terraces is already marked as the eighth wonder of the world. In the year 1995, the clusters of terraces at Bangaan, Mayoyao, Batad, Hungduan, including Banaue got the declaration of being the World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.
Banaue serves as a gateway to these Ifugao rice terraces, the so called UNESCO World Heritage located in Northern Luzon, Philippines. The rice terraces serves as a magnificent testimony to the Ifugao community’s brilliant agricultural engineering. UNESCO illustrates the Banaue Rice Terraces to be a perfect amalgamation of physical, economic, socio-cultural as well as religious milieu. It is marked as an active cultural landscape that reflects its own dignity and splendor.
The Banaue Rice Terraces and other Ifugao terraces at Bangaan, Mayoyao and so on are carved out about 2000 years ago are still used today by the locals. It is said that if the ends of each step of these rice cultivated terraces are joined end to end to form a chain, it would encircle half of our globe. This measure the enormity of the hard labor put by Ifugao farmers to cultivate rice grains for their survival from the otherwise barren hill slops.