Native Hawaiians lived along this windward North Shore for centuries before the sugar came. Then in 1880 Samuel Alexander and Henry Baldwin opened the Pāʻia plantation and built the island's first great mill just outside town, channeling water down long flumes to carry the cut cane to the harvest. Immigrant workers arrived from Japan, China, Portugal and the Philippines to cut and haul it, housed in plantation camps that grew into a town. By the 1890s Pāʻia's was among the largest sugar operations in the world, and by the turn of the century the town was Maui's most important North Shore community — more than a fifth of the island's people, plus stores, schools, theaters, hotels and a hospital. The plantation built the town, and the town built a culture.
Then the wind found it. Just two miles east at Hoʻokipa, the relentless trade winds and reef break combine into some of the most consistent windsurfing conditions on earth, and through the 1980s and 1990s the pioneers of the sport set up shop in town and made Pāʻia known the world over as the "Windsurfing Capital of the World." The same winds now draw kitesurfers and foilers too. The giant winter wave at Jaws (Peʻahi) lies just beyond, and green sea turtles haul out to rest on the sand at Hoʻokipa — watched, by law, from a respectful distance. And all the while Pāʻia kept its oldest job: the last town to gas up, grab food and turn east onto the 64-mile Road to Hāna.
Why People Visit Pāʻia
Pāʻia offers a whole mood in one small town: bohemian, barefoot charm, world-class wind and surf, and the romance of the open road to Hāna. It is the coolest little town on Maui — and for the artists, surfers and free spirits who live here, simply home, the place where old Maui still feels like itself.
