Palawan
Palawan is an island province suspended between the Sulu and South China seas. With its capital at Puerto Princesa, Palawan's almost 2,000 kilometers of irregular coastline are dotted with roughly 1,780 islands and islets, rocky coves, and sugar-white sandy beaches. It also harbors a vast stretch of forests that carpet its chain of mountain ranges. The terrain is a mix of coastal plain, craggy foothills, valley deltas, and heavy forest interspersed with riverine arteries. With a population of about one million, the province is a melting pot of 87 different cultural groups and ethnicities, who make a living largely through fishing and farming.
Hailed as the last frontier of the Philippines, Palawan is only beginning to welcome tourists in substantial numbers. For the intrepid traveler, Palawan promises a journey of discovery and serenity: beautiful islands, incredible sunsets, green forests, unexplored hills and unspoilt beaches.
For travelers with an interest in diving beneath appearances, Palawan presents an unfolding dynamic, at once hopeful and distressing, of the three-way struggle between development, community and nature. Timber logging had depleted most of the primary rainforests, but a ban implemented in the late 1980s has enabled the rainforest to cover the province in a verdant mantle of green. The province’s teeming variety of tropical fish and coral have suffered serious setbacks at the hands of the fishing industry, but nature has an incredible capacity for regeneration and, at the margins, environmentally conscious developers are beginning to join hands with nature and the community to accelerate the process of recovery. Tourism presents both a bane and a boon: thoughtless development could destroy this precious world resource and marginalize the community; responsible tourism however could underwrite the development of this vast and incredible archipelago as a haven for the blessings of nature and the enterprise of human beings.