Bataan

Bataan National Park was created in 1945 on the peninsula of the same name, west of Manila Bay, and protects some 235 km² around the volcanic massifs of Mount Natib and Mount Mariveles, both considered potentially active volcanoes.

It preserves one of the few fragments of montane forest left in central Luzon, in a densely populated and heavily transformed region. The vegetation combines dipterocarp forest at lower altitudes with montane and cloud forest on the summits, and the massif performs an important hydrological function for the surrounding provinces.

The date of its creation is no accident. The Bataan peninsula was the setting in 1942 of the last stand of Filipino and American forces against the Japanese advance, and of the subsequent Bataan Death March, in which tens of thousands of prisoners were forced to walk more than a hundred kilometres with an enormous number of deaths. The park was declared in 1945, immediately after the liberation, and its territory preserves memorials and traces of that fighting alongside its natural values.