Benguet

Benguet's history is inseparable from gold. Pre-colonial Ibaloi communities traded gold with lowland traders who brought it to the coastal ports and into the wider Southeast Asian commodity networks. The Spanish knew about Cordillera gold and made repeated attempts to control the mines, none of which succeeded. It took the Americans to establish systematic mining extraction.

Anti-mining activism in Benguet has been persistent since the 1970s. Indigenous communities whose ancestral lands cover mine sites have fought — sometimes violently, often legally — to assert rights over their territory. The issue remains unresolved.

The Ibaloi are the indigenous people most associated with lower Benguet and the areas closest to Baguio. Historically, the Ibaloi were known for the practice of mummification — preserving their dead through smoking and then placing them in sitting position in burial caves. A number of these mummies have been discovered in Benguet caves, some with colonial-era artifacts.

The Kankanaey

The Kankanaey inhabit the higher elevations of Benguet and much of Mountain Province. They are known for the dap-ay system — the traditional men's house and council space where community governance, rituals, and education of young men took place. The dap-ay is a physical expression of a democratic community structure that operated without formal chiefs.

Mining and Indigenous Rights

The conflict between Cordillera mining interests and indigenous land rights has defined Benguet's political life for decades. The anti-Marcos Chico River dam campaign of the 1970s — which successfully stopped a dam that would have flooded ancestral Kalinga territory — produced a model for indigenous resistance that communities in Benguet have drawn on in their own fights against mining expansion.

Benguet's highland climate makes possible foods unavailable in the lowlands: strawberries, temperate vegetables (lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, carrots), and cut flowers. The province supplies a significant portion of Luzon's fresh vegetable market. Local cooking reflects this abundance of cool-weather produce alongside the Cordillera staples of smoked pork and root crops.

Benguet has two primary indigenous languages: Ibaloi (spoken in lower Benguet and the areas closest to Baguio) and Kankanaey (spoken in the higher municipalities). Both belong to the Cordilleran branch of Philippine languages, related to each other and to Bontoc and Kalinga-Isnag.

Baguio City's influence on Benguet's linguistic landscape is significant. The city is multilingual — Tagalog, Ilocano, Kankanaey, Ibaloi, and English are all in use — and that multilingualism extends into surrounding Benguet municipalities. Young people in La Trinidad and Baguio's surrounding barangays often use Tagalog as their primary language.

English is strong in Benguet, particularly in areas connected to the university and mining sectors. The University of the Cordilleras and Benguet State University, both in the Baguio-La Trinidad area, maintain significant English-medium instruction.

Benguet is visited primarily through Baguio City, which serves as the base for most highland Luzon travel. La Trinidad's strawberry farms are a standard day trip from Baguio. The province's own municipalities — Kabayan, Bokod, Kibungan — require more effort and reward it with less crowded landscapes.

The mummies of Kabayan are not in a museum. They are in the mountain. The caves where Ibaloi families placed their dead — seated, bound, smoked over low fires for weeks until the flesh preserved — are still in the limestone above the Kabayan valley. Some have been looted. Some have been damaged by amateur visitors. The ones that remain in situ are guarded now, with permits and rangers and a designation as national cultural treasures.

The practice stopped several centuries ago — the exact period of cessation is unclear, somewhere between late Spanish colonization and the early American period. What the Spanish missionaries could not immediately change, the American administration and the Christian conversion campaigns eventually did. The smoking of the dead was suppressed. The caves were sealed, or rather, the communities stopped using them for their intended purpose and the location of many was not widely shared.

One of the most famous mummies, known as Apo Annu, was removed from its cave by a local collector and eventually ended up in the National Museum in Manila in 1918. Kabayan community members spent decades petitioning for its return. In 1999, Apo Annu was brought back to Kabayan and reinterred in a ceremony attended by the descendants of the communities that had placed him there. The return took eighty-one years.

The guides who take trekkers to Timbac Cave tell the story of Apo Annu on the trail. They tell it straightforwardly: here is what was taken, here is where it went, here is how long it took to come back. Then they show you the cave, the remaining figures seated in the dark, the way the smoke-darkened walls still carry the color of what was done here hundreds of years ago. It is not a museum visit. It is something closer to a return.