Camiguin is a small volcanic island of just 241 km² in the Bohol Sea,
about 10 km off the northern coast of Mindanao. Pear-shaped and crowded with seven
volcanoes - more per square kilometre than any other island in the Philippines - it is
crowned by Mount Timpoong at 1,580 m and by Mount Hibok-Hibok (1,332 m),
the island’s only historically active volcano, whose two summits form the
Timpoong–Hibok-Hibok Natural Monument, an ASEAN Heritage Park. The provincial
capital Mambajao sits on the northern coast beneath the peaks.
Camiguin’s landscape is written by eruption. After months of earthquakes, a fissure
opened on Hibok-Hibok’s flank on 30 April 1871 and grew, over four years, into a
new lava dome - Mount Vulcan, the “Old Volcano” - that buried the old capital of
Catarman and sank its Spanish-era church and graveyard beneath the sea. That drowned
burial ground is the Sunken Cemetery, now marked offshore by a great white cross
and declared a National Cultural Treasure in 2018. Hibok-Hibok woke again in 1948–1951;
its 4 December 1951 nuée ardente killed around 500 people and prompted the
founding of the Commission on Volcanology, the forerunner of PHIVOLCS. The same volcanic
heat feeds the Ardent Hot Springs on the mountain’s foot.
Dive below the surface. Orbit the camera down through the water. No open
bathymetric service covers the Bohol Sea at this resolution, so the underwater relief is
modeled from distance-to-shore: a thin turquoise fringe around White Island’s
sandbar and Mantigue Island’s marine sanctuary, dropping swiftly into the deep
blue of the sea that separates Camiguin from Mindanao and Bohol.