Philippines: Delfina Guiwan’s heart was pounding as she snuck back to her village, now abandoned and eerily quiet, in the fertile foothills of the gently erupting Mayon volcano in the north- eastern Philippines.
When patrolling police spotted her, they warned that the village is off-limits because of the danger of a violent eruption at any time.
Ms Guiwan, 47, said she knew the risks but begged to stay a few minutes more to get her daughter’s school uniform from their shack and feed her pigs.
Entry is prohibited, but thousands of poor villagers have flouted the restrictions and made it their home for generations. Lucrative businesses such as sand and gravel quarrying and sightseeing tours have also thrived openly despite the ban and the mountain’s frequent eruptions – now 53 times on record since 1616.
The 2,462-metre volcano is one of the Philippines’ top tourism draws because of its near-perfect cone shape.
But it is also the most active of the country’s 24 volcanoes and could erupt violently at any time.
The thousands of villagers who live within Mayon’s danger zone reflect the plight of many impoverished Filipinos who are forced to live in treacherous places across the archipelago – near active volcanoes like Mayon, on landslide-prone mountainsides, along vulnerable coastlines, on top of earthquake fault lines and in low-lying villages often engulfed by flash floods, said Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippine Red Cross and a former senator.
Each year, about 20 typhoons and storms lash the Philippines, which also lies along the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of fault lines along the Pacific Ocean basin often hit by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.
