Lake Sebu is the largest of three interconnected highland lakes cradled at
roughly 700 m above the sea in the mountains of South Cotabato, in the upper
Allah Valley of Mindanao. It spreads across some 354 hectares and drops to
about 34 m deep, feeding two smaller sisters downstream - Lake Seloton
(the deepest) and little Lake Lahit - all three protected within the
Allah Valley Protected Landscape.
This is the heartland of the T'boli, the "people of the dream weave". Their sacred
cloth, t'nalak, is woven from abaca fibre in patterns revealed to the weavers in
dreams; the master weaver Lang Dulay of Lake Sebu was named a National Living
Treasure in 1998 for keeping the craft alive. The lake surface is quilted with floating
bamboo fish cages - Lake Sebu is one of the country's great tilapia producers,
and the fish is served fresh at the lakeshore.
Where the lakes spill north the land falls away in a steep gorge, and the river tumbles
through the Seven Falls - a chain of seven cascades, the tallest (Hikong Bente)
dropping about 21 m. A zipline strung some 180 m above the ravine, among the highest in
Southeast Asia, flies visitors over the drops. You can see the escarpment on the north edge of
this scene, where the 700 m highland plunges toward the Allah Valley floor.
Built live in your browser from real data: NASA SRTM elevation (Mapzen terrarium tiles from
AWS) decoded pixel-by-pixel and displaced at true horizontal scale, draped with Esri World
Imagery, plus a finer imagery inset over the lakes. The lake datum is sampled straight from the
elevation grid, so the water sits at its real highland altitude; the underwater relief is
modeled from distance-to-shore scaled to the published 34 m maximum depth. The smaller sister
lakes are below the 30 m grid's reach - look for them by their labels.