The island also gave the world something joyful. At Waikākā, in the early twentieth century, the ancient Hawaiian art of heʻe nalu — wave-sliding — was carried into the modern age, above all by Duke Kahanamoku, Waikākā's Olympic swimmer and the father of modern surfing. Duke won Olympic gold in 1912 and 1920, and spent his life giving surfing demonstrations from California to Australia, becoming Hawaiʻi's great ambassador of aloha. On the North Shore, the open Pacific delivers the biggest rideable waves on earth along a famous seven-mile stretch, and winter names like Pipeline, Waimea and Sunset became the proving ground of big-wave surfing. From these shores the sport spread around the world — Oʻahu is where surfing, ancient and modern, belongs.
And on a Sunday morning the world changed here. On December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor took the lives of 2,403 Americans — more than a thousand of them aboard the USS Arizona — and brought the United States into the Second World War. The USS Arizona Memorial rests above the sunken ship today, a place of quiet remembrance that Oʻahu keeps with reverence, never for sale.
Why People Visit Oʻahu
Oʻahu offers the whole of Hawaiʻi in one place: deep history and living culture, world-famous surf, a great multicultural city, and beaches for every mood. It is where most visitors begin — and, for the million people who live here, simply home, the island where Hawaiʻi gathers.
