Ritidian Point is the last stretch of coast Guam never built on, and the forest behind its beach is almost completely silent. The brown tree snake, a stowaway that arrived after the Second World War, wiped out ten of the island's twelve native forest birds, so what you hear here is insects and surf. Behind the sand rises a limestone cliff some 150 metres high, and that cliff is an old barrier reef: coral that grew underwater, was lifted clear of the sea, and now looks down on the living reef that replaced it. Caves in the fossil rock hold red, white and black paintings left by CHamoru hands, one of them known as the Star Cave. A fishing camp about 3,300 years old lies buried under the beach; inland, latte stones and a Spanish well mark the mission that stood here in the 1670s.
All of it sits inside the Ritidian Unit of the Guam National Wildlife Refuge, the only part of the refuge open to the public: Wednesday to Sunday until four, and shut whenever the surf turns dangerous. Nothing is sold inside — just white sand, ironwood shade and water clear enough to count the ripples on the bottom. You swim and snorkel in the shallows: walking the reef flat is banned unless you are fishing, and the sea beyond the reef is off-limits; the caves and the latte village are reached only on a guided refuge tour. The pressure is real. A Marine Corps live-fire range now occupies the plateau above, its danger zone overlapping refuge land, and the refuge's buildings are being moved out from under it. Guam's last mature håyun lågu, a tree that grows wild nowhere but here and on Rota, stood on this cliffline until Typhoon Mawar broke it in 2023.