The Philippines is an archipelago of about 7,641 islands in the western Pacific, lying between Taiwan and Borneo with the South China Sea to the west, the Philippine Sea to the east and the Celebes Sea to the south. Its land area is about 300,000 km², and it falls into three island groups: Luzon in the north, the Visayas in the centre and Mindanao in the south. Luzon (about 105,000 km²) and Mindanao (about 95,000 km²) together make up two-thirds of the land. The highest point is Mount Apo, a dormant volcano of 2,954 m on Mindanao, the longest river is the Cagayan in northern Luzon at about 520 km, and the largest lake is Laguna de Bay beside Manila. The country is volcanic, mountainous and hit by typhoons every year, and those facts have decided where its 112.7 million people (2024 census) live, farm and work.
Only about 1,000 of the islands are inhabited, and eleven of them hold 95 percent of the land. Settlement, farming, industry and even the national borders follow from a few physical facts: the archipelago sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, it lies across the typhoon belt, and nearly everyone lives close to the sea.
Central Luzon's Rice Granary and the Shores of Manila Bay
The largest lowland in the country spreads across Central Luzon, through the provinces of Pangasinan, Tarlac, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga and Bulacan. It is flat, crossed by the Pampanga River, the second-largest river on Luzon, and produces most of the national rice supply, which is why the region is nicknamed the Rice Granary of the Philippines. South of it the lowland continues to Manila Bay, a sheltered harbour on whose shore Manila became the capital of the Spanish colony.
Behind the bay lies Laguna de Bay, a freshwater lake of roughly 911 to 949 km² filling an old volcanic caldera. It averages only about 2.8 m deep and drains to the sea through the Pasig River, which runs through the heart of the capital. Lake, river and bay together created the site for Metro Manila. The metropolis covers 636 km² between the two bodies of water and had 14,001,751 people in 2024, spread over sixteen cities including Manila, the capital, and Quezon City, the most populous. It accounts for about 36 percent of the country's GDP. Its growth has spilled south into the Calabarzon provinces around the lake, now the most populous region in the country.
The Ifugao Terraces and Baguio in the Cordillera Central
North of the plain the land rises into the Cordillera Central, whose ridges mostly reach 2,500 to 2,750 m and culminate in Mount Pulag, flanked to the east by the Sierra Madre, the longest mountain range in the country. Between the two runs the Cagayan Valley, drained northward by the Cagayan River to the sea at Aparri. The terrain also helped the Igorot peoples of the Cordillera hold out: Spain never fully subjugated the uplands around what is now Baguio, and their landscape shows a farming tradition built for steep ground.
In Ifugao Province, farmers carved the steep slopes into stone- and mud-walled pond fields, fed by irrigation channels that collect water from the forested summits above. In 1995 UNESCO listed the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, with sites at Batad, Bangaan, Mayoyao, Hungduan and Nagacadan, as the first property ever inscribed as a cultural landscape. Their age is debated: the listing assumed more than 2,000 years, but the Ifugao Archaeological Project has dated their construction to around the time of Spanish contact, about 400 years ago.
Altitude also made the Cordillera a refuge from lowland heat. The Americans chose Baguio, at about 1,500 m, as the summer capital after a 1900 expedition. Kennon Road, begun in 1903, linked the town to the lowlands. Baguio's average temperature is about 18 °C, against roughly 27 °C at sea level, and pine forest grows around it.
Pinatubo, Mayon and Taal on the Ring of Fire
The islands sit in the Philippine Mobile Belt, squeezed between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate. Off eastern Mindanao the Philippine Sea Plate dives into the Philippine Trench, which reaches 10,430 m at the Galathea Depth. About 20 earthquakes are recorded each day, most too weak to feel, and volcanoes have repeatedly redrawn the map of where people can live.
The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, on the western edge of the Central Luzon plain, was the second-largest of the 20th century. On 15 June it sent an ash cloud 35 km into the atmosphere, pyroclastic flows filled valleys with up to 200 m of debris, and more than 840 people died, many when roofs collapsed under wet ash. Lahars flooded or partly buried lowland towns, kept recurring with the rains for years and swept through Clark Air Base, which the United States handed back to the Philippines that November after its lease was not renewed; the site is now Clark International Airport and a freeport zone. The collapsed summit left a caldera 2.5 km wide that now holds a crater lake.
In Albay, Mayon rises 2,463 m from the shore of Albay Gulf in an almost perfect cone. It is the most active volcano in the country, with more than 50 eruptions in the past 500 years, the first recorded in 1616. Yet eight towns and cities, Legazpi among them, divide its cone between them like slices of a pie. Taal, about 50 km south of Manila, is a caldera filled by Taal Lake, with the Tagaytay Ridge along its northern rim; its 2020 eruption began on 12 January. The same heat has an upside: geothermal plants meet about 18 percent of the country's electricity needs, making the Philippines the world's second-largest geothermal producer after the United States.
Typhoon Haiyan and the Exposed Eastern Seaboard
The Philippines lies across the main track of Pacific typhoons, which strike most often from July to October. They hit northern and eastern Luzon, Bicol and the Eastern Visayas hardest, because those coasts face the open Philippine Sea. The Sierra Madre acts as an eastern wall for Luzon, breaking storms before they reach the central plain, and the east-facing mountains catch up to 5,000 mm of rain a year, while some sheltered valleys get under 1,000 mm.
Where there is no such wall, the sea itself becomes the danger. In November 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda, made landfall at Guiuan in Eastern Samar with ten-minute winds estimated by PAGASA at 235 km/h. At least 6,300 people died in the Visayas, and the storm surge appears to have been the main cause of death and damage. In Tacloban, a low-lying city on Leyte facing Samar, a 5.2 m surge reached the second storey of the airport terminal and officials estimated that about 90 percent of the city was destroyed. The disaster showed how much risk comes from building dense cities on low coasts that face the open Pacific.
Mindanao from the Bukidnon Plateau to Mount Apo
Mindanao, the second-largest island, holds the country's two highest summits. Mount Apo, at 2,954 m, is a flat-topped stratovolcano on the border of Davao City, Davao del Sur and Cotabato, with no recorded historic eruption. Its name means "revered elder" in local Lumad languages, short for Apo Sandawa, the mountain's ancestral spirit. Mount Dulang-dulang, at 2,941 m, is the highest point of the Kitanglad range in Bukidnon and is regarded as sacred by the Talaandig people. The third-highest peak, Mount Pulag at 2,928 m, is in Luzon's Cordillera Central, where Benguet, Ifugao and Nueva Vizcaya meet.
Bukidnon is a landlocked plateau averaging about 915 m above sea level in north-central Mindanao. Its cooler, rolling uplands are the region's food basket: rice and maize on the farms, and pineapples, bananas and sugarcane on large plantations. Below Apo, Davao City sprawls over 2,443 km², the largest city in the country by land area, and had 1,848,947 people in the 2024 census, making it the largest city outside Metro Manila.
Sea Borders from the Bashi Channel to the Spratlys
An archipelago's borders are almost all at sea. The country has a coastline of about 36,289 km and an exclusive economic zone of more than 2.2 million km². In the far north, the Batanes Islands end at Mavulis, also called Y'Ami, which the Bashi Channel separates from Taiwan's Orchid Island group, about 98 km away at its nearest islet. In the south-west, the Sulu Archipelago reaches towards Borneo, and the Philippines keeps what it calls a dormant claim to eastern Sabah, based on an 1878 agreement between the Sultanate of Sulu and the British North Borneo Company. Malaysia regards the matter as a non-issue, reading that agreement as a cession.
West of Palawan, the Philippines administers part of the Spratly Islands as the municipality of Kalayaan. Its centre is Thitu, or Pag-asa Island, 37.2 hectares in area and about 500 km west of Puerto Princesa. The Philippines took control of it in 1971, after Taiwanese troops withdrew. China, Vietnam and other governments claim overlapping parts of the Spratlys. In July 2016 an arbitral tribunal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ruled in favour of the Philippines on most of its submissions against China, finding that historic-rights claims within the nine-dash line have no legal effect beyond what the convention allows. The tribunal did not rule on who owns the islands, and China and Taiwan both reject the ruling.
From the Rice Granary to Kalayaan, Filipinos have settled wherever soil, harbours and water allow, and accepted volcanoes, earthquakes and storm surges as the price. For a closer look at two of the mountains above, see our guides to Mount Pinatubo and Mayon Volcano; for the city that grew where Laguna de Bay drains into the sea, read our profile of Manila.