Travel deep dive
Guam's Chamorro Culture: Latte, Fiestas and Language
Chamorro culture is not something Guam keeps behind glass. The islands of the Marianas have been home to the Chamorro people and their ancestors for some 3,500 years, the language is official alongside English, and the Catholic calendar of the villages still organises much of island life. For a visitor, the most direct ways in are a village fiesta, the latte stone and the Guam Museum in Hagåtña.
Updated 2026-09-19
The latte stone: an ancient foundation, a modern emblem
A latte is two stones: a pillar, the haligi, and the rounded capstone set on top of it, the tasa. Cut from limestone, basalt or sandstone, they raised the houses and important buildings of Chamorro villages during what archaeologists call the Latte Period, roughly a thousand to five hundred years ago, and Spanish missionaries called them the houses of the ancients.
The latte has become the symbol of the Chamorro people, repeated in public buildings, seals and monuments across the island. The easiest place to stand beside original stones is Latte Stone Park in Hagåtña; in the north, the Ritidian unit of the Guam National Wildlife Refuge leads guided tours through the remains of an ancient latte village and a cave with pictographs, which are open only on scheduled tours.
Nineteen villages, nineteen fiestas
Each of Guam's nineteen villages is gathered around its own patron saint, its own Catholic church and its own fiesta day. The celebration builds through a nobena, nine days of special rosary prayers, and ends with festal masses and a procession, when devotees carry the statue of the saint through the village streets as the sun goes down. Visitors are welcome to join, and a fiesta is one of the most direct ways to meet Guam's villages on their own terms.
After the procession comes the fiesta table, which matters as much as anything laid on it: it is where families and their guests are brought together, and it sits at the centre of Chamorro culture — the dishes themselves are a subject of their own. One celebration belongs to the whole island rather than one village: on 8 December, Guam holds a procession in honour of Santa Marian Kamalen, its patron saint.
The language you will hear first
English and Chamorro are both official languages of Guam, and although English is spoken everywhere, Chamorro is a living language rather than a ceremonial one. The first word a visitor learns is “Håfa Adai”, the everyday greeting, somewhere between hello and what's up; the second is usually “Si Yu'os Ma'åse'”, thank you. The tourism board and the Guam Museum spell the language itself CHamoru, and both spellings are in use.
The Guam Museum: the story in its own words
The Guam Museum on Skinner Plaza in Hagåtña tells the island's history as the story of its people. Its permanent exhibit, “I Hinanao-ta”, the journey of the CHamoru people, runs through seven galleries of artifacts, images, recordings and short films, with panels in both English and Chamorro and QR codes that translate the text into Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Korean.