By the late 1960s the company had consolidated as Maui Land & Pineapple, and its leaders began imagining a second life for the land along the shore. In 1975 the first golf course opened above Kapalua Bay, and the first hotel followed soon after — the beginning of Kapalua Resort, a master-planned community built right on top of the working plantation. For a while the two coexisted: golfers and guests below, pineapple fields still climbing the hills above. Slowly the balance tipped, until the resort became the main event and the fields became the backdrop — a Hawaiian place remaking itself, as Hawaiian places had before, around whoever was arriving by sea.
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.
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.
