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.
So Kauaʻi gathers the oldest Hawaiian island, the deepest green in the chain, a canyon and a coastline carved by rain, and the proud history of a kingdom joined but never taken. Our Kauaʻi designs gather that into wearable form. Wear the history. Kauaʻi — the Garden Isle, where the oldest Hawaiian island wears its green like a crown.
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.
