Scattered across central Bohol stand well over a thousand near-identical
conical hills - a minimum of 1,260, and by some counts more than 1,776 - spread across the
towns of Carmen, Batuan and Sagbayan. Each cone rises 30 to 120 m
from an otherwise flat plain. They are cone karst: a platform of marine limestone
built from Pliocene coral reefs, uplifted and then dissolved by rain and groundwater into
the rounded haycocks you see today. The site was declared a National Geological
Monument in 1988, and in 2023 the whole island joined the network of
UNESCO Global Geoparks.
Why "chocolate"? In the dry months the grass that carpets the hills withers to
a rich cocoa-brown while the tree-lined hollows between them stay green - the whole field
looks like rows of chocolate drops. Drag the Season slider to run the grass from
lush wet-season green to dry-season chocolate. The best-known viewpoints are the
Chocolate Hills Complex above Carmen and Sagbayan Peak to the west.
Folk tales credit the hills to giants: two who hurled boulders and mud at each other; a
grieving giant, Arogo, whose tears for the mortal Aloya dried into mounds; or giant children
who left their mud cakes to bake in the sun.
Built live in your browser from real data: NASA SRTM elevation (Mapzen terrarium tiles
from AWS) decoded pixel-by-pixel and displaced at true horizontal scale, draped with Esri
World Imagery, plus a finer imagery inset over the Carmen complex. The cones are small for
30 m radar, so the vertical relief is lifted a little to bring them out.