The canopies at Marine Corps Drive and West Santa Monica Avenue go up in the dark. On Saturdays and Sundays the Dededo Flea Market opens as early as 5 a.m. By the time the sun clears the lot, the grills are going, coolers of reef fish and live crabs are open, and someone is already leaving with a $3 bag of mangoes. By 9 or 10, vendors are packing up.
The Dededo Flea Market runs on a timetable. The weekend market lasts about five hours on each of two mornings. The indoor Farmers' Co-op next door keeps its own weekend-morning hours. Food trucks were at the old flea market site on a Tuesday evening this September, five years after a plan to move them. And a transit terminal that broke ground across the street in June is set to add a fourth clock to the same corner. Which part of "the flea market" you get depends on when you show up.
The Five-Hour Window on Weekend Mornings
GuamFoody's August 2026 listing gives the weekend hours as roughly 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, and says the best time to go is 6 to 8 a.m. A February 2025 food tour put the window at 5 to 9 a.m. Visit Guam's page says the market opens at 6 a.m. All three sources agree on one thing. This is a morning market, and the end comes early. Plan to get there in the first half and treat 9 a.m. as the start of closing time.
That short window explains how the lot works. Here is a weekend morning laid out by the clock, using the GuamFoody listing:
- From about 5 a.m. Vendors set up and the first shoppers come through. Local farmers sell tomatoes, mangoes, bananas, avocados, papayas, calamansi, eggplant, taro and squash. Fishermen sell reef fish and live crabs from coolers.
- From 6 to 8 a.m. This is the window GuamFoody recommends. Reviewers it quotes call the market "the best local breakfast food on the island" and say the best deals go to people who arrive at 6.
- From about 9 to 10 a.m. Vendors start packing up, and the best items are already gone.
Bring cash. Most vendors don't take cards. The prices are why cash goes so far. GuamFoody lists a full breakfast plate for a few dollars, BBQ sticks for a dollar each and a bag of mangoes for $3. The non-food rows carry household goods, baby clothes, electronics, plants, pets and tools.
What's on the grills
The breakfast staple is the island-style plate of fried rice, eggs and meat. CHamoru empanadas, fried golden and filled with ground meat, vegetables and red rice, sit next to batchoy, arroz caldo, hot dogs, hamburgers, tropical fruit juices and fresh coffee.
One stall you can count on is Josie's Express, the weekend flea market outpost of Josie's Special Batchoy. It's open Saturday and Sunday mornings and serves batchoy and BBQ plates with red rice. The February 2025 tour also stopped at Kris B.B.Q. for a plate of barbecue, pancit, chicken kelaguen and red rice, and at Booth 19 for apigigi and suman. Weekend vendors rotate, so take that list as a picture of early 2025 and look for those booths when you walk the rows.
Inside the Co-op, the Same Morning Runs at a Different Pace
On the same corner, the Farmers' Co-op Indoor Market runs on the same weekend mornings but works differently. GuamFoody says it offers "something its famous neighbor cannot: shade." The stalls carry vegetables, fruits, herbs and farm products from local growers, and what's on the tables changes with the seasons. Farmers there sell straight to shoppers, without a middleman or a corporate buyer setting terms. The listing calls the inside "calmer and more focused" than the open-air lot.
That gives one weekend trip two speeds. You can work the open lot early for breakfast and the cooler stalls before the 9 a.m. pack-up, then move indoors for produce once the sun is up. The co-op's listed address is the Route 1/Fatima intersection in Dededo.
The co-op is also why the market's evening story never quite settled.
Weekday Evenings, Back at the Old Site
In January 2021, the Pacific Daily News reported that Dededo Mayor Melissa Savares and co-op board member Kathrina Reyes were discussing opening the newer flea market, run by the Farmers Cooperative Association of Guam, on Tuesday nights for food trucks, retail and produce. The mayor described the problem at the old location:
"Right now there's so many food trucks on a Tuesday night (at the old market) and it's a really tight area there, the road is very narrow, so we're having this discussion with the co-op, but we haven't finalized it."
Reyes told the paper the move would give farmers "an opportunity to also come and sell produce rather than selling only on Saturday and Sunday." Both said vendors would gain from better lighting, better security and longer hours at the co-op.
Five years later, trucks were still turning up at the old site. PDN photo captions show residents checking out food trucks at "the old Dededo flea market" on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026. Those photos ran with PDN's coverage of a food truck roundtable held at the Guam Legislature that same day, and that coverage helps explain why truck schedules shift.
At the roundtable, Pono Hawaiian Grill owner Bert Javier described trucks rotating through the island's night markets: Tumon on Sundays, Hågat on Tuesdays, CHamoru Village on Wednesdays, Mangilao on Thursdays and Yona on Fridays. Operators said they bid for spots and pay different fees depending on whether the location is run by a village mayor, a government agency or a private business. A truck's week is a route, and Dededo's evening lot is one stop on it. Trucks that line up on a September Tuesday may be somewhere else on another one. Before driving over, check the social pages of the trucks you follow.
The Next Clock Is a Bus Route
On June 29, 2026, officials broke ground on the Guam Regional Transit Authority's Dededo Park & Ride Northern Terminal. It sits on West Santa Monica Avenue, directly across from the Guam Farmer's Co-op and Flea Market compound. PDN's coverage describes a three-acre hub where riders can park and board GRTA's "Road to Education" route. A $9.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Transit Administration and the Government of Guam pays for it. The grant also covers 10 buses and eight vans.
The route has 10 stops, and the market is the second:
- Dededo Park and Ride Terminal
- Guam Farmer's Market
- Northern Regional Community Health Center
- Barrigada Mayor's Office
- Department of Youth Affairs
- Mangilao Mayor's Office
- University of Guam
- George Washington High School
- Guam Community College
- Santa Teresita Catholic Church
GRTA Interim Executive Manager Tyrone Taitano told PDN the authority was still procuring architecture and engineering design and the buses, and hoped to have everything done by 2027. Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero said the project had been at least five years in the making. Taitano said federal funding took time, and the first property didn't work because of utility easements. The Guam Housing and Urban Renewal Authority then deeded GRTA the current site.
For a corner whose busiest hours have always been set by vendors setting up and packing down, this is a real change. The 2021 plan to give the co-op a weekday evening came out of a road too narrow for the trucks at the old site. The terminal brings a fixed schedule, a parking lot and a stop named for the market, all on West Santa Monica Avenue. Once the buses run, a student headed to UOG or GCC could leave a car across from the co-op on a weekday. On a weekend morning the same corner could serve as a park-and-shop. GRTA has described the hub as a link to schools, health care and government services, so any weekend use would be a side effect of having three acres of parking across from the market.
For the weekends between now and 2027, the timing stays the same. Get there by 6, bring small bills, eat on the open lot, buy produce under the co-op roof, and be done before the 9 a.m. pack-up.
If you're a Dededo regular, you already know which booth sells out first. If you're new to northern Guam, maybe on PCS orders or settling in near Route 1, Tia Perez is happy to talk through the village with you, starting with the corner of Marine Corps Drive and West Santa Monica Avenue. Reach out and we'll start with your favorite breakfast plate.
