This Resort in the Philippines Lets Visitors Dine Next to a Waterfall

While dining at the Villa Escudero Plantations and Resort near San Pablo City in the Philippines, guests can enjoy local cuisine while immersed in nature: a rushing waterfall, to be precise.

According to Travel + Leisure, the resort’s unique Waterfalls Restaurant lets visitors dine at the foot of a man-made cascade. Its watery spray was formed when the Philippines built its first working hydroelectric plant, the Labasin Dam. Guests sit at bamboo tables and are served Filipino staples like seafood, meats, and curries. Afterward, they can splash around in the falls, and enjoy entertainment like dancing and live music.

Villa Escudero was once a coconut plantation. In 1981 it was transformed into a hacienda-style resort with local village tours, water buffalo cart rides, and a quirky museum that displays artifacts owned by the plantation’s founders, a prominent Filipino clan called the Escudero family.

Don Placido Escudero and his wife, Dona Claudia Marasigan, founded the Villa Escudero Plantations in the 1880s. Their son was Don Arsenio Escudero, the agriculture industrialist who built the Labasin Dam to supply his family’s land with water. Today, Villa Escudero offers guests a historic peek into late 19^th-century plantation life. If you’re curious to check it out for yourself, you can book a full-day experience at the resort (lunch at the waterfall included) for $100.