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.
Roughly circular and about 552 square miles, Kauaʻi is the fourth-largest Hawaiian island and home to some 73,000 people, sitting at the northwest end of the main chain — far enough out that no road can circle it, since the Nā Pali cliffs see to that. Its summit, Kawaikini, rises above 5,200 feet near the rain-soaked center. Polynesian voyagers settled here more than a thousand years ago and built a society around the sea and the taro terrace; the Wailua river valley held one of the islands' great royal and sacred centers, a birthplace of chiefs, and Kauaʻi keeps its own folklore of the Menehune, the legendary builders said to have raised a stone ditch and fishpond that still stand today. Long before it was anyone's vacation, this was deeply settled, deeply storied Hawaiian ground.
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.
