Hagåtña Springs

The spring in Hagåtña is the setting of Guam's best-known aetiological tale — the explanation for why the island is wide at both ends and narrow in the middle. In the version adapted by Guampedia from a 1962 College of Guam class booklet, the giant ancestors called the taotaomo'na watched fishermen notice that Hagåtña Bay and Pago Bay were both widening, the island's waist narrowing by the day. A Pago fisherman finally saw the cause: a giant fish gnawing the land from beneath.

The men of Guåhan paddled out for days and failed to find it. The maidens succeeded without leaving the spring. The women gathered at Hagåtña Springs to wash their hair with lemon-scented water, and when lemon peels turned up floating in Pago Bay, a maiden reasoned that the fish had eaten a tunnel clean under the island and was hiding beneath the spring itself. The women cut their long hair — magical, in the telling — wove it into a net while they sang, lured the fish to the spring's mouth with the singing, and trapped it. The maidens saved the island; the island kept its narrow waist as the fish's bites.