The beauty of Mayoyao

I DO not like the historical maps in which the entire territory of the Philippines is colored as if it was entirely occupied by Spain. Not all of the Philippine archipelago came to be de facto dominated by Spain, even in 1898, even though it was nominally and legally a Spanish possession. Among the territories that most courageously and stubbornly resisted Spanish jurisdiction is part of what is now known as the Cordillera Administrative Region, an extensive rugged and mountainous area that occupies the entire center and north of Luzon, inhabited, even today, by a large number of Indigenous peoples, exonymously called Igorrotes/Igorots (inhabitants of the mountains).

Three reasons can be adduced for the Spanish failure: the lack of troops to materialize the domination, the extraordinary orographic difficulty of the territory, and the resistance capacity and tenacity of the Igorots. The region then housed the only known gold mines in the archipelago, more than enough motivation to promote military and religious intervention — euphemistically called pacification and reduction — especially considering that the domain of the Philippines was unprofitable for Spain and subsisted economically thanks to that periodic subsidy that arrived from New Spain through the Manila galleon: the "situado."