Cagayan Travel Guide and Itinerary – Cagayan Valley, designated as Region II, is an administrative region in the Philippines, located in the northeastern section of Luzon Island.[4] It is composed of five Philippine provinces: Batanes, Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya, and Quirino. The region hosts four chartered cities of Cauayan, Ilagan, Santiago, and Tuguegarao.
Most of the land area is situated on the valley between the Cordilleras and the Sierra Madre mountain ranges. The eponymous Cagayan River, the country’s largest and longest, runs through the region and flows from the Caraballo Mountains and ends at Aparri. Cagayan Valley is the second largest Philippine administrative region by land area. According to a literacy survey in 2013, 97.2% of Cagayan Valley’s citizens (ages 10 to 64) are functionally literate, which is the highest out of the seventeen regions of the Philippines.
Cagayan Valley is the large mass of land in the northeastern region of Luzon, comprising the provinces of Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino, and the Batanes group of islands. It is bordered to the west by the Cordillera mountain range, to the east by the Sierra Madre, to the south by the Caraballo Mountains, and to the north by the Luzon Strait.
The region contains two landlocked provinces, Quirino and Nueva Vizcaya, which are ruggedly mountainous and heavily forested. Nueva Vizcaya is the remnant of the southern province created when Cagayan Province was divided in two in 1839. They are ethnically and linguistically diverse, with a substrate of Agtas, Negritos who are food-gatherers with no fixed abodes, overlaid by Ilongots and others in a number of tribes, some of whom were fierce head-hunters (they have given up the practice), with the latest but largest element of the population being the Ilocanos, closely followed by the Ibanags.
