Los Baños

About Los Baños

Spanish friars named this lakeshore town after its baths, the hot springs that bubble up at the foot of Mount Makiling, and warm pools are still what many weekend visitors from Manila come for. Los Baños sits on the southern shore of Laguna de Bay, with the forested, legend-wrapped volcano of Makiling rising directly behind it.

Today the town is best known as a centre of learning and science. The leafy campus of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, famous for agriculture and forestry, spreads up the mountain slopes and holds a natural history museum and botanic gardens, while international research institutes have made the town a quiet hub for the study of rice and tropical farming. The campus was also the site of a wartime internment camp liberated in a daring raid in February 1945.

Hikers climb through the Makiling forest to the steaming Mud Spring, families picnic at Dampalit Falls and the little crater lake of Tadlac, and nobody leaves without a box of buko pie, the coconut custard pie that has become the town's edible souvenir.