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.
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.
