Guam's patroness is a small dark image of the Immaculate Conception whose origin is told as a gift of the sea. In the traditional account a fisherman off Merizo saw the statue floating toward shore escorted by two crabs bearing lighted candles on their backs, and understood at once that the Lady had chosen the island. Kept first in a storehouse, a camarin, from which she takes her name, the image survived the centuries' typhoons, earthquakes and wars, was hidden and protected through the Japanese occupation, and now stands above the altar of the cathedral basilica in Hagatna. Her feast on 8 December, the Immaculate Conception, is a public holiday of the territory, and the procession that carries her carriage through the capital, the men of the island hauling and the villages following with their banners, is Guam's largest annual religious gathering, a moment when Chamorro identity, Catholic faith and civic life are visibly one thing.
Devotion to her is bound up with promises: families walk in the procession, dress children as angels or wear the Lady's colours in payment of favours, especially recoveries and safe returns from military service, in a community that sends many of its young into the armed forces. An attempted theft of the image in the 2000s only deepened the island's protectiveness, and she remains, as the old people say, the true owner of Guam.