The people of the Magat Valley

The expeditions into the Magat Valley reveal a certain amount about the local peoples living there. The earliest expeditions used the normal mode of communication in the Philippines, that is to say, they went by water and so they went round the coast. They penetrated as far south along the Cagayan River as Nueva Segovia (Lal-loc), and although one expedition returned overland, i.e., south from Nueva Segovia, no further exploration seems to have taken place in that interior until the expedition led by Luis Pérez in 1591. The omens were not good. So many of the encomiendas in Northern Luzon were ‘hostile’ or ‘in rebellion’, according to the report of Gómez Pérez, that it is odd that the Spaniards seem not to have expected much resistance. The expedition followed the same route as the modern road at first but seems to have stayed closer to the Magat River after the mountain pass. In essence Luis Pérez Dasmariñas focused on a relatively small area around Tuy (Aritao), Dupax, Dangla, Bayombong and Bagabag as far as the confluence of the Magat and Cagayan rivers. ¹ The Magat Valley itself is wide and flat after one has gone over the Balate (now Dalton) Pass from Pampanga: it was described later as ‘a beautiful province, of fertile soil, of polite and hospitable people, of lovely mountains, limpid streams and triumphant forests’. ² Photographs from the early twentieth century show large expanses of rice fields adjoining a wide river (the Magat) and it seems highly probable that the valley had changed little in the intervening centuries. ³