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.
Sugar is gone now, and tourism has taken its place, but Kauaʻi wears it more lightly than its neighbors. It stayed the green, quiet island — slower than Oʻahu, less built than Maui — and when Hurricane Iniki, a Category 4 storm, tore across it in September 1992, the island rebuilt and stayed itself. Today its economy runs on nature travel, diversified farms, taro, and coffee — Kauaʻi is home to the largest coffee farm in the United States — along with a film industry drawn by the same scenery everyone else comes for: the canyon, the cliffs, the waterfalls, and the green. The Garden Isle has changed hands and changed crops, but never its character.
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.
