Mount Banahaw

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Before the sun has cleared the ridge, a woman leaves her rubber slippers at the mouth of a cave in Barangay Kinabuhayan and goes in barefoot. The passage is low and the rock runs with cold water; halfway through she has to turn her shoulders and press her cheek to the stone to get past the narrowest point, the place the guides on the mountain call the birth canal. She comes out the far side wet to the knees and, by the reckoning of the faith she keeps, made new. A short walk downslope brings her to the river shrine of Tubig na Kinabuhayan — “water of resurrection” — where a shallow basin has been worn into the streambed. There is a mark in the rock there that the pilgrims read as the yapak ni Kristo, the footprint Christ pressed into the mountain. She fills a plastic bottle from the spring, cups a palmful over the back of her neck, and touches her hand to the print.

She is standing on a Calvary that is also the floor of a drained volcanic crater. Long before it carried a single biblical name, this was a mountain the lowland Tagalog held sacred the way they held many mountains and springs sacred — as a dwelling of the anito, the ancestral and nature spirits, and a source of living water. The Passion narrative laid over its caves and waterfalls is barely more than a century old in its present form. The reverence beneath it is far older, and the two have grown into a single thing.

Mount Banahaw seen from Lucban, Quezon, a lenticular cloud settled over its summit. Huegotpix, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The drained lake

Banahaw is a dormant andesitic volcano straddling the border of Quezon and Laguna provinces in the Calabarzon region of southern Luzon. At 2,170 meters — about 7,120 feet — it is the highest peak in both provinces and in the whole region, and, standing just over 100 kilometers southeast of Manila, it is the closest 2,000-meter mountain to the capital. The Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program describes not a single cone but a complex: the Banahaw volcanic complex is built of several overlapping stratovolcanoes, of which the neighboring, forbidding-looking Mount San Cristobal to the west and Banahaw de Lucban to the northeast are the chief companions of Banahaw proper. The whole massif sits inside the Mounts Banahaw–San Cristobal Protected Landscape, some 10,901 hectares of montane and mossy forest.

The summit is not a peak so much as a rim. It holds a caldera roughly 1.5 by 3.5 kilometers across and about 210 meters deep, its southern wall breached and fallen away. That breach, and the ravines and springs that lace the southern slopes, are tied by geologists to the mountain’s last confirmed eruption, dated to 1730 — a figure some older sources give as 1743. Before that event a lake is said to have filled the summit crater; when the rim gave way the lake drained down the mountain’s face, and the water that once stood still at the top has run ever since through the gorges and out of the rock as the springs the pilgrims now call holy. The topography of the faith is, quite literally, the topography of that collapse. Where the crater emptied, the sacred water begins.

The reverence the mountain carries did not begin with a church. Among the settled river-and-shore communities of the Tagalog, high places, old trees, and the sources of streams were dwellings of the anito and the diwata, the nature spirits, and were approached through a ritual specialist — for the Tagalog the catalonan, the counterpart of the Visayan babaylan — who carried the community’s words to the spirits. A mountain that made its own weather, hid its summit in cloud, and poured cold water out of its flank from no visible source was, in that older frame, exactly the kind of place where the unseen came close. The creator the Tagalog named Bathala sat far off in the sky; the mountain was near, and full of presences one could reach.

Onto that older ground came four centuries of change. The mountain’s spiritual gravity sharpened in the colonial and revolutionary era, when its forests sheltered people the lowland order had no room for — faith-healers, dissenters, and the founders of millenarian brotherhoods who read in Banahaw a promised refuge.

The most famous of them made the slopes of Banahaw and San Cristobal his last redoubt. Apolinario de la Cruz — remembered as Hermano Pule — was a Tagalog born in 1815 at Lucban, in what was then Tayabas province and is now Quezon, at the very foot of the mountain. Barred, as a native Filipino, from the Spanish religious orders, he founded in 1832 a confraternity open only to Filipinos, the Cofradía de San José, which grew to some four to five thousand members across Tayabas, Batangas, and Laguna. When the Spanish moved against it as a threat, the brotherhood fell back to the flanks of San Cristobal, and there in 1841 it fought colonial troops and, briefly, hailed Hermano Pule as “King of the Tagalogs,” a Tagalog messiah. The revolt was crushed that October and its leader executed, but the pattern held: a homegrown, Catholic-inspired movement of the excluded, taking the holy mountain as its ground. The Rizalista and mystical churches of Banahaw are heirs to that impulse more than to any pagan past.

By local tradition the biblical names now fixed to the mountain’s features were revealed during the Spanish period to a devotee, Agripino Lontoc, by disembodied Santong Boses, “holy voices,” that told him what each cave and fall was to be called. Whatever its origin, the naming took. Today more than a hundred puestos — sacred stations — are scattered across the slopes, concentrated on the Quezon side in the town of Dolores, about 170 kilometers by road southeast of Manila, and above all in its barangays of Kinabuhayan and Santa Lucia.

Walking the puestos

A puesto is a natural feature read as a holy site: a cave, a boulder, a tunnel, a waterfall, a spring, each given a name and a meaning drawn from Scripture and the Passion. Their names map the mountain as a sacred geography one can walk through. There is Kalbaryo, Calvary; Husgado, the “Cave of Judgement”; Kweba ng Dios Ama, the Cave of God the Father; Santong Jacob and Prisentahan; the falls called Kristalina and Suplina; the hidden door named Pintong Lihim; and the resurrection spring, Tubig na Kinabuhayan, with its footprint of Christ. Set end to end they compose a landscape in which the whole arc of judgment, death, and rising can be crossed on foot in a day.

Crossing it is the devotion. The core practice is pamumuesto — going from station to station, praying at each in turn, lighting candles, leaving petitions, drinking and carrying away the spring water that is held to be genuine holy water with the power to heal. Some of the caves are entered as rites of passage: the narrow, water-slick tunnels the pilgrims call birth canals are crawled through so that one emerges spiritually reborn. The day’s walking builds toward the climb, the ascent to pray at the peak itself. Many devotees do not finish in a single visit; they return across seasons and years, adding stations, until they have walked the mountain whole. The great season is Holy Week, when Banahaw’s biblical topography allows a pilgrim to retrace the Passion not as reading but as terrain — to stand at a Calvary of andesite and cloud, to descend into a Cave of Judgement, to rise wet from a birth canal in the days between the crucifixion and the empty tomb.

The stations are not evenly holy or evenly hard. Some sit a short walk from the road and draw families with children and candles; others lie deep along the Cristalino trail — past Kristalina and Suplina falls, the mirror-pool called Salamin Bubog, the Cave of God the Father, and the hidden door of Pintong Lihim — and are reached only by those who mean to spend the whole day at prayer. A pilgrim carries little: water bottles to fill at the springs, candles, a rosary, sometimes a written petition to leave in a cleft of the rock. The walking itself is the liturgy, and the exhaustion is part of it.

None of this reads, to the people who keep it, as a survival of something older wearing Christian dress. It is a living folk Catholicism, complete and present-tense: the water heals, the footprint is Christ’s, the mountain is what the devout call it — a bundok na banal, a holy mountain, and a New Jerusalem, a purified place set apart from a fallen world where the pure of heart can come near to God, to Christ, and to the spirits of the ancestors at once.

Mount Banahaw and Mount San Cristobal from the air over Quezon, the forested massif that holds the pilgrimage. Patrickroque01, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The mountain is also the home ground of a distinctly Filipino family of faiths, the Rizalista movements — folk-Catholic churches that revere the national hero José Rizal, executed by the Spanish in 1896, as a divine or Christ-like figure, a redeemer of the Filipino people. More than a hundred such communities cluster at Banahaw’s foot. The largest is the Suprema de la Iglesia del Ciudad Mística de Dios — Ciudad Mística for short — whose gated compound stands in Barangay Santa Lucia in Dolores. Its account of itself traces the church to a woman mystic, Maria Bernarda Balitaan, and since her death it has been led without exception by women, each holding the office of Suprema; in recent years the Suprema has been Isabel Suarez. Ciudad Mística reckons its adherents at around 100,000, drawn from across Luzon and beyond, who gather in the Santa Lucia compound on the fifteenth of each month to pray. What passes in the heart of its worship is the church’s own; from the public record what stands out is the shape of the thing — a syncretic, female-led theology of the Second Coming, at home on a mountain whose oldest ritual authorities were also, overwhelmingly, women.

The witch on the mountain

Banahaw’s layering — old Tagalog reverence, Spanish Catholicism, a homegrown mysticism — is the local face of a national history in which conquest reworked the indigenous religion rather than erasing it. The Spanish arrival is precisely dated: Miguel López de Legazpi landed at Cebu in 1565 and took Manila, the Tagalog heartland, in 1571. What followed in the lowlands was not a clean replacement of one faith by another but a long overwriting. Missionaries kept the Tagalog word Bathala and redirected it to name the Christian God, so that the old creator’s title came to sit on a new deity. The anito — the ancestral and nature spirits who had been the near powers, the ones actually spoken to — were recast as devils, and their veneration was pursued as idolatry, their images sought out and burned.

The sharpest edge of that campaign fell on the indigenous religious authorities themselves, and here the record has to be read for what it did as much as for what it says. The ritual leaders of the old religion — the Tagalog catalonan, the Visayan babaylan, and their kin across the islands — were overwhelmingly women, or men who took on women’s dress and role, the asog of the Visayas and the bayog or bayoguin of Luzon. They were healer, medium, and diviner in one, and they stood high in their communities. The friars set out to break their prestige by inverting it. As modern Filipino scholars trace the sequence — set out, among other places, in the Aswang Project’s account of the shift from babaylan to aswang — the priestess-healers were demonized first as witches, the hechiceras and brujas of seventeenth-century friar writing, and then, by the late nineteenth century, folded into the figure of the aswang, the shapeshifting night-monster of Philippine folklore. The office that had once exorcised the aswang from the sick was, in the colonial telling, made into the aswang. A class of native leaders — female, sometimes gender-crossing, and central to the old faith — was rewritten as a class of monsters, and their medicine handed to the horror it had once cast out.

That inversion did not stay in the archive. The aswang is today one of the most durable figures in Philippine popular culture, a fixture of horror films and television, its origin as slander against a religious office largely lost to the audiences it frightens. But the reclamation runs the other way as well. Present-day Filipino feminists and scholars have taken the babaylan back up as a symbol of pre-colonial female authority and spiritual leadership, and LGBTQ+ Filipinos have reclaimed figures such as the dual-gendered fertility deity Lakapati as ancestors of gender fluidity — a sober recovery of what the colonial record set out to make monstrous, offered not as endorsement of the old slur but as its correction. On Banahaw the continuity is quieter and more literal: the women who lead Ciudad Mística’s prayer stand in a line of female ritual authority on this mountain that the demonization never fully cut.

The mountain has drawn a second, wholly modern reception as well — an ecological one. By the early 2000s Banahaw’s pull had become its own hazard. In the years before 2004, more than half a million pilgrims and trekkers were reported to ascend during Holy Week alone, and the crowds left the mountain scarred: tons of trash, worn and gullied trails, and slopes destabilized to the point of landslide risk. In March 2004 the Department of Environment and Natural Resources ordered Banahaw closed to let the forest recover — a suspension first set at five years, then pushed to 2012, then to 2015, and only partly relaxed when some sections were reopened to hikers in 2019. For much of the mountain the closure still holds. The result is a standing negotiation, renewed each Holy Week, among three claims on one place: the conservationist’s, who sees an ecosystem in recovery; the pilgrim’s, whose faith is exercised by walking these exact stones; and the tourism office’s, which counts arrivals. The mountain is asked to be a watershed, a shrine, and a destination at once, and the officials who manage it spend each dry season deciding, again, how much of it the faithful may climb.

A pilgrim turned back at a ranger’s checkpoint on the Kinabuhayan trail is not being told that the water at Tubig na Kinabuhayan is not holy. She is being told the mountain needs the year, and that the resurrection spring will keep. On Banahaw the sacred and the endangered are the same ground, and the terms of the truce are written one closure at a time.

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