The protection of northern Negros began on April 28, 1935, when Governor-General Frank Murphy signed Administrative Act No. 789, establishing a forest reserve spanning 107,727 hectares across the mountainous interior of the island. Eleven years later, on August 7, 1946, President Manuel Roxas reduced the reserve to its present area of 80,454.5 hectares through Proclamation No. 798. The land remained classified as a forest reserve for nearly six decades until 2005, when President Gloria Arroyo signed Proclamation No. 895, converting the area into a natural park under the National Integrated Protected Areas System Act. Each designation carried stronger protections. Each reflected a growing understanding that the forests of northern Negros were not just timber reserves but functioning ecosystems whose value lay in leaving them standing.

The municipality of Salvador Benedicto sits within the park's boundaries, two-thirds of its entire land area falling inside the protected zone. Pine trees line the main highway through town, and the cooler mountain elevation has earned Salvador Benedicto the unofficial title of Summer Capital of Negros Occidental. The town's relationship with the park is both privileged and constrained. Negros Occidental Representative Julio Ledesma IV once filed a bill seeking to carve out a 200-hectare townsite from the proposed 500-hectare government property within the park. Governor Alfredo Maranon pushed back, opposing any encroachment into the protected area and instead offering to convert land in the municipal proper for development. The negotiation captures the central tension of the park's existence: communities live within and depend upon a landscape that conservation requires them to leave largely untouched.

The park spreads over five municipalities and six cities, a jurisdictional complexity that makes coordinated management difficult. As Negros Occidental's primary watershed, the forested mountains capture rainfall and release it gradually through streams and rivers that feed reservoirs and irrigation systems downstream. Without the forest canopy, rainfall would erode the mountain slopes, silt would choke the rivers, and the steady water supply that the Bacolod metropolitan area relies on would become erratic. The stakes extend beyond ecology. Agriculture, municipal water systems, and the province's economic engine all trace their water back to these mountains. Every hectare of forest cleared upstream translates directly into reduced water security downstream.

Northern Negros is part of one of the most biologically significant islands in the Philippines. The Visayan region harbors endemic species found nowhere else on Earth, and the mountainous forests of this park represent some of the last intact habitat for those species. The park has been identified by BirdLife International as an Important Bird Area, and its elevation range, from lowland forest through mossy montane zones, supports a diversity of life adapted to each altitude band. For visitors, the park offers trails through primary forest, views across the Visayan Sea, and an encounter with a landscape that has been fought over, legislated about, and ultimately preserved because the alternative was too costly to accept.