Tonga Cave

Tonga Cave is a large limestone cavern just outside Songsong village on Rota — roughly sixty meters deep and eight high, dense with stalactites and stalagmites — that has served the island in every era on record. The Marianas Visitors Authority notes the likelihood that ancient Chamorros used it for thousands of years before the cave's documented service began.

Its twentieth-century record is specific. During World War II the Japanese military operated a small hospital inside it — a function echoed in the concrete hospital ruins the sugar company Nanyo Kohatsu built south of Songsong and that American bombardment wrecked. In the decades after, before concrete housing became standard, Rota families returned to the cave through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s as their refuge when typhoons came through.