Mt. Naupa

Mt. Naupa’s grassy, treeless summit draws the inevitable comparisons to pasture country abroad, but the bald look isn’t natural — cogon grass and light cattle grazing keep the tree line from creeping back up, the same dynamic behind several of Cebu’s other grass-covered peaks. The trailhead sits inland from Naga City, whose lowland economy runs on cement rather than tourism; Apo Cement’s plant in Tina-an is one of the largest in the country, a contrast worth noting on the drive up. The 360-degree view from the top holds up in both directions — toward the cement stacks and the coast, and toward the quieter ridgelines further inland.

• The trail is fully exposed; bring more water than you think you need and start early to beat the heat.
• Camping at the summit works well for a clear night sky, well away from any city glow.
• Register at the barangay hall before starting — standard practice for community-managed trails like this one, not a formality to skip.

The registration fee collected at the barangay hall is a small but concrete example of tourism revenue staying local rather than passing through an outside operator — it typically covers basic trail upkeep and gives the barangay a reason to keep clearing and monitoring a route that would otherwise cost them nothing to ignore. It’s the same informal-guiding economy found across most of Cebu’s smaller highland trails, just formalized slightly more here with an actual registration step rather than a negotiated fee at the trailhead.

That grass cover is also more fragile than its resemblance to pasture country suggests. Cogon grassland like this holds soil less effectively than either dense forest or a properly managed pasture, since its root systems are shallower and the grazing that keeps trees from reclaiming the slope also keeps the ground more exposed to rain than a forested hillside would be. Erosion on a fully exposed summit like Naupa’s is a slower, quieter problem than a landslide, but repeated foot traffic cutting new paths across the grass compounds it — worn bare patches don’t recover the way a resilient pasture grass would elsewhere, since cogon regrows unevenly once trampled.

Apo Cement’s presence in the valley below is a genuine contrast worth sitting with rather than just noting in passing: one of the country’s longer-running cement operations, drawing limestone from the same karst geology responsible for Naupa’s own bald hills, employs a meaningful share of Naga’s lowland workforce while the highland barangays above still run largely on subsistence farming and the trickle of income from hikers and campers. The view from the summit puts both economies in the same frame — industrial extraction on one side, small-scale agriculture and informal tourism on the other — without either fully explaining the other.

Camping here works because there’s genuinely little competing light for miles, a byproduct of how sparsely developed this stretch of highland has stayed compared to the resort-heavy coastline not far away. That same lack of development is exactly what keeps the registration-and-guide system feeling more like a real community arrangement than a tourism product, at least for now.

Explore More in Central Cebu Highlands and Metro Fringe

• Bonbon Falls
• Cebu Transcentral Highway
• Mt. Mauyog