Batanes is the Philippines' northernmost province — a cluster of ten small islands in the Luzon Strait, closer to Taiwan than to Manila. Only the three largest islands (Batan, Itbayat, and Sabtang) are inhabited, and the total population is among the smallest in the country. The provincial capital is Basco on Batan Island.
The landscape is unlike anywhere else in the Philippines: rolling green hills, stone houses with thick walls and cogon-grass roofs built to withstand typhoons, and dramatic coastal cliffs dropping into the Pacific. The Ivatan people who live here have their own language and a culture shaped by centuries of isolation and fierce weather. Fishing and farming are the mainstays of life.
Batanes sees relatively few visitors, partly because flights from Manila are limited and frequently cancelled by weather. Those who make it find an extraordinarily peaceful, photogenic place — the kind of destination where the main activity is walking through open hills above the sea.