The golf is part of why the name traveled. A second championship course, the Plantation Course, opened in 1991 on the high slopes with the ocean spread out below, and for more than twenty-five years it opened the professional golf season each January — putting Kapalua on television screens worldwide every New Year. The pineapple era, meanwhile, wound down: after nearly a century, the last Maui Pineapple operations closed in 2009, and the fields went quiet. What is left is the layered place you visit now — a resort coast with a plantation underneath it, and a reef-blue bay that was the draw all along.
The modern story starts in 1836, when Dr. Dwight Baldwin, a missionary doctor, settled on Maui. In 1853 he received a royal grant of about 2,675 acres of the West Maui uplands, and that grant — expanded by later purchases until it reached some 24,000 acres — became Honolua Ranch. For its first decades the ranch ran cattle and raised mixed crops: coffee, taro, mango, aloe. Baldwin's son, Henry Perrine Baldwin, saw bigger possibilities in the rich volcanic soil, and with a Scottish ranch manager named David Thomas Fleming — an avid horticulturist who planted the tall Cook and Norfolk pines that still line Kapalua's roads — he began turning the ranch toward a single, transforming crop.
Why People Visit Kapalua
Visitors come to Kapalua for the bays — the calm, reef-fringed water that earns the best-beach lists — and stay for the layered scenery: a manicured golf coast, plantation uplands, and the channel islands on the horizon. It is quiet, walkable, and built to let West Maui's landscape take the lead. Equal parts beach, history, and big ocean views, Kapalua rewards anyone who wants the Hawaiian coast at its most embracing.
