Legazpi

Don't settle for laing — pinangat is its prouder cousin, neat pouches of taro leaves stuffed with more taro strips, shrimp paste, pork and dried fish, drowned in coconut milk and fired up with siling labuyo. Camalig outside Legazpi claims the country's best, and you can watch it wrapped fresh in nipa cottages by Sumlang Lake.

This is gata-and-chili country, so order Bicol Express (pork in coconut milk and a frankly reckless amount of chili) and laing (dried taro leaves simmered creamy) and accept that 'spicy' here is not a suggestion. Every old eatery does its own version — comparing them is basically the local sport.

Legazpi's sweetest culinary plot twist — a local chef folded Bicol's gata-and-chili soul into pizza and pasta, so a volcano-shaped stuffed pizza erupts with pinangat, Bicol Express and Guinobatan longganisa. It's homegrown fusion born in a small family café in 1999, not a trend imported from Manila.

The world's most perfect cone backdrops everything here, but the most moving way to feel it is at Cagsawa — a lone belfry poking from the ground where a church and town were buried alive by Mayon's catastrophic 1814 eruption that killed over a thousand. Frame the belfry against the cone; it's the most photographed grief in the Philippines, now a National Cultural Treasure.

Albay throws two big ones: the province-wide Magayon Festival, named for the 'beautiful maiden' legend behind Mayon, and Legazpi's own Ibalong Festival each August, where masked street dancers become Baltog, Handyong and Bantong, the warrior-heroes of the Bicolano creation epic. Mythology turned into a citywide costume party since 1992.