What's with "the Garden Isle"? Kauaʻi is the oldest of the main Hawaiian Islands — some five million years of weather have had the longest to work on it, and it shows. Near the island's center, Mount Waiʻaleʻale catches the trade winds and rings up among the wettest places on Earth, and all that rain has to go somewhere: it has cut the red-walled chasm of Waimea Canyon, fluted the green sea cliffs of the Nā Pali Coast, and filled the taro valleys of the north shore. The result is an island so lush it earned a single nickname that has stuck for generations — the Garden Isle. Watch the clouds pile up on Waiʻaleʻale and you are watching the machine that built the scenery.
The wider world arrived early here. In January 1778 the ships of Captain James Cook made the first European landfall in all of Hawaiʻi at Waimea, on Kauaʻi's west side — a meeting that opened the islands to trade and, with it, to introduced diseases that would devastate the Hawaiian population in the generations that followed. A brief Russian trading venture left the star-shaped lava-rock walls of Fort Elizabeth at Waimea in 1816, and Protestant missionaries came ashore at the same town in 1820. Each left a mark, but none unseated the Hawaiian world that had been here for centuries.
Why People Visit Kauaʻi
People come to Kauaʻi for the oldest, greenest island in the chain and the quieter pace that comes with it. It rewards travelers who would rather hike a canyon rim or paddle a north-shore bay than chase a crowd — a place of waterfalls, taro valleys, and emerald cliffs, with a deep Hawaiian history and a slower, garden kind of aloha.
