The Protected Landscape Approach - Centre for Mediterranean ...

The Protected Landscape Approach: Linking Nature, Culture and Community
bundle the rice and transport the bundles manually on shoulder poles or on tops of heads for
storage in granaries.
More culture-nature connections are evident. Terraces are commonly built in three ways.
Walls are constructed completely of stone. The second method is by building walls of packed
mud. The third variation mixes a foundation course of stone and packed mud wall above.
Terraces rise in groups from valleys, climbing up the slopes stopping just below peaks
continually covered with mist. Terraces normally face east, to assure a maximum of sunlight.
A ring of private forests (muyong) caps each terrace group. The management of the muyong
are closely regimented through traditional tribal practices. The owners of the forest parcels are
fully conscious that they are participating in a collective effort. Their forests are essential in
maintaining ecological balance and each owner knows that any negative intervention brings
disadvantage not only to him, but also to the other terrace owners.
Water, the lifeline of the terraces, is equitably shared. No single terrace is allowed to obstruct
the flow of water from his downhill neighbour. A complex system of dams, sluices, canals and
bamboo pipes transfers the water from the highest terrace to the lowest, draining into a stream
or river at the foot of the valley. Hydraulics has been traditionally used for construction.
Temporary dams constructed around rocks are flooded to allow large rocks to be manually
pushed or “floated” to their desired location. Terraces are filled with earth through hydraulics.
After the walls are built, the enclosed area is flooded with mud that then becomes the subsoil for
the paddy.
The terraced landscape illustrates the complexity of architecture in rice. It establishes
architecture as one of the many elements in the totality of agricultural, engineering, environ -
mental and cultural traditions that come together in the growing of rice. It sets architecture in
the context of a cultural and environmental system.
Of all Philippine monuments, the rice terraces are the best known throughout the country. In
fact, most Filipinos regard the terraces as their greatest national symbol, an appropriate symbol
because the site is not a single monument but a vast, living site that combines both the natural
and cultural. It is also a significant monument because it was built voluntarily without any
forced labour. What makes the symbol even more appropriate is that the rice terraces combine
architecture, engineering, and environmental management in a system that is still sustainable to
this day, a fitting tribute to the traditional thinkers who set the management system centuries
ago. The system has been orally handed down to allow their people to continue living on the site
and for them to continue to grow rice.
The cultural landscape of rice is a phenomenon that combines both natural and cultural
concerns. It brings out that fact that the landscape of rice cannot be understood if its parts are
studied individually. The architecture of rice, therefore, should be viewed in the context of the
cultural landscape in which it exists. Although traditional knowledge orally handed down from
generation to generation has guided the maintenance of the Rice Terraces of the Philippine
Cordilleras, its contemporary maintenance history has always been tied into its status as a
World Heritage site.
The fragile site owes its preservation to the strong spiritual values of the Ifugao culture that
has been guiding all aspects of daily life for over a thousand years, as some scholars maintain.
Tradition has always been the source that determined all cultural and physical actions in the
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