Maui is the Valley Isle, two volcanoes joined by a green central plain. The older West Maui Mountains rise on one side, cut by the deep cleft of ʻĪao Valley; the vast shield of Haleakalā climbs on the other. The first people to call it home were Polynesian voyagers who reached the islands more than a thousand years ago, navigating thousands of miles of open Pacific by the stars. They built a society organized around the ahupuaʻa — land divisions running from the mountains to the sea — fishing the reefs, growing taro and sweet potato, and keeping a rich oral tradition of chant and genealogy. Maui has been a Native Hawaiian homeland, continuously, ever since.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries reshaped the land. Sugar and pineapple plantations spread across the central valley and the slopes, drawing workers from around the Pacific and diverting West Maui's streams to irrigate the cane — a transformation that brought new communities and lasting costs. The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was overthrown in 1893 and the islands annexed by the United States in 1898; Hawaiʻi became the fiftieth state in 1959. Through all of it Native Hawaiian culture endured on Maui, carried in language, place names, and the steady work of keeping tradition alive.
Why People Visit Maui
Maui draws visitors for its landscape and its depth — a sacred volcanic summit, a rainforest coast road, a green valley behind the harbor towns, and the Pacific where humpbacks winter — all carried by a living Native Hawaiian culture. People come for Haleakalā, the Road to Hāna, and the beaches, and stay for the quiet of upcountry and the sense of a place with a long memory. It is scenic, storied, and unmistakably Hawaiian.
