Hagåtña

A CHamoru settlement stood at the mouth of the river here long before Europeans came, and the Spanish made it their headquarters soon after missionary work began in 1668. The town became the seat of the governor of the Marianas, with a palace on what became the Plaza de España and the island's first church, of 1669, on the site of today's cathedral; a hill fort, Santa Agueda, was added above the bay about 1800. For two centuries it was the only place on Guam that resembled a town, and CHamoru, Spanish and Filipino families mixed in its streets.

The United States took Guam in 1898 and kept the capital as the naval government's centre, spelling it Agana. Japanese forces occupied the island from December 1941 and renamed it, and the town was almost entirely destroyed in July and August 1944, when American bombardment and street fighting preceded the recapture. Photographs from that summer show Marines walking through rubble with almost nothing standing.

Reconstruction changed the place permanently. The ruins were bulldozed and much of the debris pushed into the bay to form the Paseo de Susana peninsula, the town was rebuilt on a grid of wide streets, and residents who had been displaced settled instead in Tamuning, Dededo and other villages, where land was available. The capital regained its offices but never its people. Government has stayed, joined in 2016 by the Guam Museum on Skinner Plaza; the CHamoru spelling Hagåtña was formally restored in 1998; and the town remains the island's ceremonial heart while daily life happens elsewhere.

Hagåtña is the island's stage. Liberation Day in July fills its main street with a parade of floats, village entries, marching bands and veterans, and December brings the procession of Santa Marian Kamalen, the island's patroness, from the cathedral through the streets — the two occasions when the small capital is crowded. Inaugurations, protests and memorial services all happen on or near the plaza.

Because the government, the museum, the legislature and the courts are here, so are the island's arguments about identity: decolonisation and the political status of the territory, land taken for military use, the revival of the CHamoru language and the care of ancestral sites disturbed by construction. Carvers, weavers and dance groups perform at the museum and the Chamorro Village, and CHamoru greetings — hafa adai as hello, si Yu'us ma'åse' as thanks — are used freely in public life.

Manners are Pacific and Catholic. Extended family obligation, chenchule', binds people through weddings, christenings and funerals; elders are greeted first; and the church calendar organises much of the year, with the village fiesta for each patron saint bringing open houses and tables of food. Visitors are welcomed easily, and the expectation is simply politeness, modest dress away from the beach and patience with an unhurried pace.

Barely a thousand people live in Hagåtña, which makes it one of the smallest capitals in the world by population, but tens of thousands pass through it on weekdays. Government is the business of the town: the legislature, the governor's complex just west at Adelup, courts, agencies and the offices of lawyers and accountants around them, along with the museum, the cathedral and a scattering of shops and lunch places.

The day is short and sharp. Traffic builds along the coast road from Dededo and the southern villages in the early morning, offices work through a hot middle of the day, and by early evening the streets are quiet again, with the action moved to Tumon and the shopping centres. Market nights are the exception, when the Chamorro Village brings families, music and food stalls into the town after dark. Weekends belong to church, the sports grounds on the Paseo and fishing from the boat basin.

The concerns here are those of the whole island, discussed in its institutional centre: the cost of living and of shipping everything in, the health of the economy between military spending and visitor numbers, housing, and typhoon preparation, with concrete buildings and shutters ready each season. Sea-level rise and flooding of the low ground around the river mouth are a growing topic, as is what to do with a capital that has offices but almost no residents.

Hagåtña's food is at its best in the open air. The Chamorro Village near the boat basin is the island's showcase for CHamoru cooking, above all at its night market, where stalls grill short ribs and chicken over open fires and serve kelaguen — meat, fish or shrimp chopped fine and cured in lemon juice with grated coconut, onion and fiery donne' peppers — with warm titiyas, the flat coconut or corn breads used to scoop it up.

The plate lunch is the staple of the working town: barbecue meat, hineksa' aga'ga' (red rice tinted with achote seed), a scoop of chicken kelaguen and finadene', the sauce of soy, lemon or vinegar, onion and chilli that appears on every table. Soups, called kå'du, and estufao, a Spanish-derived stew, turn up at the counters that feed government workers, alongside Filipino turo-turo trays of adobo, pancit and lumpia, and Japanese and Korean lunch sets.

Sweets and drinks are a CHamoru speciality worth seeking at the market: latiya, a custard poured over sponge cake and dusted with cinnamon; coconut candy; guyuria cookies; and fresh young coconuts opened to drink. Fruit stalls sell mango, papaya, soursop and bananas in season, and the fish stalls take the morning's catch from the boats at the basin next door.