Baguio's Igorot Stone Kingdom: A Hand-Built Castle

Baguio is known as the Summer Capital of the Philippines, and this trip was built around that reputation for a day: it started with a hike through pine forest with friends, several of us in costumes for reasons that made sense at the time. After the forest, we wandered through the Baguio Botanical Garden before I split off from the group to go find something I'd heard about but hadn't quite pictured. It's called the Igorot Stone Kingdom, and it isn't a replica or a museum piece — it's a castle built entirely by hand by the indigenous Igorot people, stone by stone. Underneath it runs a real gold mine tunnel. Walking through it alone, after a day spent with a group in a forest and a garden, felt like finding a completely different side of the same city. It's the kind of place that doesn't show up on the standard Baguio itinerary of malls and night markets. If you're headed to Luzon and want to see what people have built there with their own hands, gold mine tunnel included, it's worth tracking down.