The Chico River is a river system in Kalinga, a landlocked province of the Philippines' Cordillera Administrative Region.[1]
It is referred to as a "river of life" for the Kalinga people who live on its banks, and is well known among development workers because of the Chico River Dam Project, an electric power generation project which local residents resisted for three decades before it was finally shelved in the 1980s - a landmark case study concerning ancestral domain issues in the Philippines.[2][3]
The Chico has a length of 174.67 kilometers and is itself a tributary of the Cagayan River. Its highest headwaters begin at Tinoc, Ifugao; Buguias, Benguet; and Mountain Province, and its tributaries are the Bunog River to the south, The Tanudan and Biga Rivers to the east, The Mabaca and Saltan Rivers to the North, and the Pasil River further downstream.[4][5]