SAGADA: Tiny pinewood bonfires burned through the night at a mountain cemetery as the largely Christian Philippines remembered its dead, turning the fog-shrouded hilltop into a vast, fragrant altar of light.

The eerie Panag-aapoy ("to light a fire") ceremony in the tourist town of Sagada has marked All Saints' Day for the past 122 years, said Winston Garlejo Menong, director of the Episcopal Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, which owns the cemetery.

As night crept in and darkness blanketed the four-hectare burial ground, the hum of activity and thick smoke gave way to a sepulchral glow as fires burned for its more than 2,000 dead.

The Cordillera mountain region's animist residents adopted Christianity only after Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in 1898, four centuries after Spanish friars had converted the people of the coasts to Catholicism.