The people of Cordillera, 3′000 years ago took on one of mankind’s most impressive landscape modification projects in order to farm effectively transform a mountainside region into what some now call the eighth wonder of the world. These are The Rice Terraces of the Philippines Cordillera. The project is astonishing due to the fact that it was completed thousands of years ago without the use of modern apparatus and machinery takes the terraces and integrated irrigation systems to a whole new level.

The idea of this craftsman is very simple and something not unique to the Philippines. In the Cordilleras region this has been applied to an area on an elsewhere unseen scale: approximately 10?360 square kilometres. Entire mountains, sometimes thousands of feet high, sculpted like blocks of wood. The natural streams and rivers of each terraced mountain and its forests have been diverted using a huge and complex arrangement of canals, sluices and taps, the same water is then pushed to the highest terraces using miles of wooden piping. when the terraces fill up they overflow and start to fill the terraced field below, and the cycle continues until the entire mini-waterfall covered mountain is carrying an immense weight of water.

The rice terraces are, a huge tourist attraction and have attracted attention and money from across the world. Water isn’t as readily available as in the past due to the effects of an earthquake and the new demand for water itself from the tourist industry. For that reason UNESCO has placed the terraces on a list of world heritage sites it believes to be ‘in danger’.