What's with Rainbow Falls? Just above town, the Wailuku River pours over the lip of a lava cave into a wide green pool, and on a clear Hilo morning the mist throws a rainbow across the whole scene. Hawaiians call the place Waiānuenue — “rainbow seen in water” — and in the old stories the cave below was a dwelling place in Hawaiian tradition. The falls drop about eighty feet and run close to a hundred across when the river is high. Reach it early, before the tour vans, when the sun is low and the spray is bright, and you'll see exactly how the falls earned both their names. It is the easiest wonder to find in Hilo, and one of the loveliest in all Hawaiʻi.
In the later nineteenth century, sugar plantations reshaped the district and drew waves of immigrant labor — Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, and others — whose families stayed and built the layered, multicultural Hilo of today. You can read that heritage all over town: in the mix of churches and temples, in the family names, in a plate lunch or a bag of malasadas or the poke and mochi sold along Kamehameha Avenue — the loco moco itself was invented on this island — and above all on the bayfront, where Queen Liliʻuokalani gave the land for a park that became an Edo-style Japanese garden, built between 1917 and 1919 as a tribute to the first Japanese immigrants who worked the cane. It is widely called the largest garden of its kind outside Japan, and it is free and open every day. When the plantations faded in the twentieth century, that community remained the heart of the place.
Why People Visit Hilo
Hilo offers the most authentic, culturally rich side of Hawaiʻi Island — waterfalls, gardens, markets, and deep Hawaiian heritage, all in a relaxed bayfront town. Visitors come for the rainforest scenery and the easy access to volcanoes and coast, and stay for the unhurried, welcoming feel of a real town rather than a resort strip. From the morning rainbows at Waiānuenue to the gardens along the bay, it rewards a slow pace. It is green, genuine, and beautiful in every season on the bay.
