The caves of Sagada
The area around Sagada is passed through from more than 60 partly vast caves. Not every is opened. Some other like Crystal Cave were closed again because some visitors have broken off minerals and have damaged the sensitive stalaktites. One of the best known caves is the Sumaging Cave, because of her impressive size also “Big Cave” called.
The visitor moves by subterranean ways with colorfully gleaming rocks and comes to a big pond which is so deep that one can swim in it.
The caves of Sagada belong to the places at which adventurers look for an incredible hoard of gold. Everywhere during her occupying of the Philippines the Japanese should have looted in the country and have accumulated a big treasure. When the Americans came to assistance to the Philippinos and the crossing became dangerous to Japan, the Japanese should have hidden a part of her treasure. The search for the gold reached her climax in 2002 when in Philippine cinemas the film “Yamashita: The Tigers Treasure” ran.
Some caves of Sagada were before burial places. For the Igorots the caves were the empire of the minds and demons. Who passes a coffin, a small present leaves there to calm the minds. By no means, however, he points with the finger at a coffin: Since this brings after the faith of the locals also even today big misfortune. By far more impressively than the coffins in the caves are hanging “coffins”. They are of massive pine wood, pressed at a dizzy height to the limestone cliffs, and some of them are thousand years old some.
The Igorots, which buried their dead people in the caves and in the rock are called in the Philippines “Negritos” - because they are of darker skin colour than the rest of the Philippine population. They are not only darker, but also look differently than the typical Philippino. Besides, the Igorots are for their part no homogeneous ethnic group, but only one collective name for the different mountain trunks in the North Luzons. Once they cultivated with big art her rice terraces and were head hunters. Today only a hollow pork skull hangs before quite a lot of dwelling. With 111 Ethnien and more than 90 languages are valid the Philippines as the country richest in people of the earth.
09/09/30 at 06:50 am
…sagada’s my hometown but i’ve never been there,.can someone get me there?..hehe..nice pictures,.they’re wonderful
10/03/17 at 11:14 am
Sagada is my parents home town and i been there for several times. the caves a great as well as the hanging coffins. my first thought when i saw the hanging coffin was, if how they put the coffins in the highest point of the big rocks if they do not have any high technology to use before. hehehe