Cagayan Valley

Cagayan Valley, designated as Region II, is an administrative region in the Philippines. Located in the northeastern section of Luzon, it is composed of five Philippine provinces: Batanes, Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya, and Quirino. The region hosts four chartered cities: Cauayan, Ilagan, Santiago, and Tuguegarao. Most of its land area lies in 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, flows from the Caraballo Mountains, and ends in 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. History Archaeology indicates that Cagayan has been inhabited for half a million years, though no human remains of any such antiquity have yet appeared. The earliest inhabitants are the Agta, or Atta, food-gatherers who roam the forests without fixed abodes. A large tract of land has lately been returned to them. The bulk of the population are of Austronesian origin. For centuries before the coming of the Spanish, the inhabitants traded with Indians, Malays, Chinese, and Japanese. In the nineteenth and 20th centuries, the prosperity found in tobacco cultivation caused many Ilokano people to settle here, it was only in this large-scale Ilocano settlement that made Ilocano language replace Ibanag as the lingua franca of the region. Tobacco is still a major factor in the economy of Cagayan, though a special economic zone and free port has been created to strengthen and diversify the provincial economy.