Maria Makiling of Mount Makiling

Mount Makiling in Laguna is widely held to be the home of Maria Makiling, a diwata of legend. José Rizal wrote her story down in 1890, and people still repeat superstitions about her, such as never carrying the forest's fruit home.

Wikipedia describes Mount Makiling as sacred to many pilgrims and one of the best-known bundok dambana in Calabarzon. Many believe it is home to the diwata Maria Makiling. In 2013 it became an ASEAN Heritage Park under the name Mount Makiling Forest Reserve.

José Rizal published his prose version, Mariang Makiling, in La Solidaridad in 1890 under the pen name Laón Laán, according to W. E. Retana's 1907 bibliography. Rizal describes a young woman living on the mountain between the provinces of La Laguna and Tayabas. Nobody ever knew exactly where she lived, he writes, because the few who found her after long wanderings in the woods could never go back, lost the path, and gave differing accounts of the place.

The University of the Philippines Los Baños (2009) calls Maria a legendary goddess, admired for her beauty and kindness, who has held the imagination of Laguna's people for generations. In the folklore it retells, she was generous until people abused her, and then she punished them with storms and floods. The university reads her as a figure for the mountain itself, with a lesson about looking after it. That year an arts festival there featured Karylle as Mariang Makiling.

Wikipedia records superstitions still told about her. Men who vanish into the mountain's forests are said to have been taken by Maria to be her husband. Visitors may eat any fruit they find there, but anyone who carries fruit home risks her anger, and may get lost, stung by insects and pricked by thorns.