That crop was pineapple. In 1922 James Dole, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company man already known as the Pineapple King, bought most of Lānaʻi for about $1.1 million — a price many thought a fool's bargain for a dry, rocky island. He was right and they were wrong: Dole planted some twenty thousand acres of the red uplands in pineapple and turned Lānaʻi into the largest pineapple plantation on Earth, a single island that by the 1930s grew roughly three-quarters of the world's supply. For seventy years this was the Pineapple Isle, and the spiky fruit made "Hawaiʻi" and "pineapple" mean nearly the same thing.
Lānaʻi's oldest stories begin with the spirits. For generations the island was shunned as a haunted place, until — as Hawaiians tell it — a chief's son named Kaululaʻau was banished here from Maui and, one by one, drove the akua ʻino, the island's evil spirits, into the sea, making Lānaʻi safe to settle. The people who came lived by the reef and the fishing grounds, and nowhere more than at Kaunolū on the southern sea cliffs — an ancient village that Kamehameha I favored as a fishing retreat. Its ruins survive today as a National Historic Landmark: stone house platforms, the great Halulu Heiau, rock carvings, and Kahekili's Leap, the cliff where warriors once dove to the sea far below. These are sacred and storied grounds, named here with respect.
Why People Visit Lānaʻi
Lānaʻi offers the rarest thing in Hawaiʻi: an island that still feels empty. It pairs a deep heritage — ancient fishing villages, a storied red-rock landscape, and the golden plantation past — with near-solitary beaches, pine-shaded uplands, and a single small town. It is quiet, scenic, and unhurried, made for travelers who want an island to themselves.
