Northern Mariana IslandsIslas Mariånas

The Northern Marianas share their early history with Guam: settlers arrived around 1500 BC, and from about AD 900 Chamorro society built latte stone houses. Tinian's House of Taga, with pillars more than five metres high, and the unfinished stones of the As Nieves quarry on Rota are among the largest latte ever made.

Spanish conquest in the late 17th century was catastrophic. After the wars and epidemics, the Spanish moved almost all surviving Chamorro from Saipan and Tinian to Guam and Rota by the 1690s. Saipan stayed nearly empty for more than a century, which is why Rota, never depopulated, is often seen as the most traditional of the islands.

In the early 19th century, after typhoons devastated their atolls, Carolinian islanders sailed north and settled on Saipan with Spanish permission. They call themselves Refaluwasch. They kept their own language, navigation traditions and clan system, and they settled coastal villages such as Tanapag and Oleai. Chamorro families began returning to Saipan later in the century.

Today both peoples are recognised in the constitution, both languages are official, and many families mix the two. The CNMI Carolinian community keeps close ties to the outer islands of Yap and Chuuk, where their ancestors came from, and traditional canoe voyages between the regions have been revived.

Spain sold the Northern Marianas to Germany in 1899 after losing Guam to the US. German rule was short and light, with copra plantations and a small administration on Saipan. Japan seized the islands in 1914 at the start of the First World War and held them under a League of Nations mandate after 1920.

Under Japan the islands were transformed. The South Seas Development Company (Nan'yō Kōhatsu) cleared Saipan and Tinian for sugar cane, built mills, a narrow-gauge railway and a port, and brought tens of thousands of settlers, many from Okinawa. By the late 1930s Japanese outnumbered Chamorro and Carolinian residents by more than ten to one, and Garapan was a Japanese town with shops, schools, shrines and a hospital.

Islanders were given limited education and a lower legal status, but many older residents remembered the period for its jobs and order as well as its discrimination. The build-up for war in the late 1930s brought airfields, gun positions and fortifications that still stand in the jungle.

US forces landed on Saipan on 15 June 1944. The battle lasted more than three weeks and ended with the largest banzai charge of the Pacific war on 7 July. Almost the entire Japanese garrison of about 30,000 died, along with around 3,000 Americans and thousands of civilians. Chamorro and Carolinian families hid in caves and many were killed in the crossfire.

In the final days, hundreds of Japanese civilians, many of them Okinawan settlers, jumped to their deaths from the cliffs at the northern tip, fearing what US troops would do and pressed by propaganda and soldiers to die rather than surrender. Banzai Cliff and Suicide Cliff are now lined with memorials, and Japanese and Okinawan groups still come to pray.

Tinian fell in early August 1944 after a short battle. Its flat land became North Field, then the largest airbase in the world, from which B-29s bombed Japan. On 6 and 9 August 1945, the Enola Gay and Bockscar took off from Tinian carrying the atomic bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the glass-covered loading pits mark the spot.

Surviving islanders spent up to two years in the Camp Susupe internment camp. The CNMI's Liberation Day on 4 July marks their release in 1946, which is why the Fourth of July here is as much a local holiday as an American one.

After the war the islands became part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, administered by the US. Saipan was closed for years as a CIA training base, and later Capitol Hill became the headquarters of the whole Trust Territory. When the other districts began negotiating for independence or free association, the Marianas went their own way.

In 1975 voters approved the Covenant to establish a Commonwealth in political union with the United States, by about 79 per cent. The Commonwealth government took office in 1978, and when the trusteeship ended in 1986 residents became US citizens. The Covenant gave the CNMI control over its own immigration and minimum wage, a choice that shaped the next three decades.

Local control of immigration allowed a garment industry to grow on Saipan from the 1980s. Factories owned mainly by Chinese and Korean firms employed tens of thousands of guest workers, largely young women from China and the Philippines, and shipped clothes to the US mainland duty-free with 'Made in USA' labels. Reports of poor conditions made Saipan a political issue in Washington in the 1990s.

The industry ended when global textile quotas expired in 2005, and in 2009 federal law took over CNMI immigration. The population has fallen since, as guest workers left and many islanders moved to Guam, Hawaii and the mainland for work.

Tourism from Japan built Saipan's hotel coast from the 1970s, and Korea and later China followed. By 2017 the islands received about 650,000 visitors a year, more than ten for every resident, most on short package trips to Garapan and Managaha.

In 2014 a Hong Kong-listed company, Imperial Pacific, won an exclusive casino licence for Saipan. Its temporary casino in Garapan briefly posted some of the highest per-table takings in the world, but the planned resort was never finished, construction workers died in accidents, and the company collapsed amid lawsuits and unpaid fees. The unfinished tower still stands over Garapan.

Super Typhoon Yutu hit in October 2018 with sustained winds of about 280 km/h, destroying homes on Tinian and southern Saipan. The pandemic followed, then the loss of Japan Airlines flights and the suspension of Chinese visitor processing in 2025. Visitor numbers in 2025 were a small fraction of the 2017 peak.

The islands now depend heavily on Korean visitors, a few Japanese flights and the uncertain Chinese market under EVS-TAP. For travellers that means empty beaches and lower prices in some hotels, but also closed businesses and fewer flights — check that a hotel or tour is still operating before you rely on it.