Magellan's Day in Guam

Every first Monday in March, Guam commemorates the discovery of the country in 1521 by the European explorer Ferdinand Magellan; this holiday is also known as 'Magellan Day'.

His parents died when he was young. Before he was a sea captain, he fought in the military. Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to sail all the way around the world. He enjoyed sailing and exploring and sailed for Portugal for many years. He also discovered a passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean that is today called the Straits of Magellan. Magellan had traveled to India by sailing around Africa, but he had the idea that there may be another route by traveling west and around the Americas. He was killed in the Philippines.

The identification of the exact place of Magellan’s landing in the Marianas continues to generate great scholarly debate. Three islands were spotted from the ships, two of them close to each other and the third, a bigger island, off to the north. Although in Guam a tradition refers to the bay of Umatac as the landing site, the logic of the route that the expedition had taken, together with the contradictory testimonies of the surviving accounts, suggests that the site was somewhere to the north of Umatac or even north of Guam itself, possibly on the island of Saipan.