That culture was a blend. The plantation camps gathered families from across the Pacific, each adding its food, faith and festivals to the mix that still flavors Pāʻia today. In 1906 the community raised the seaside Mantokuji Soto Zen Mission, a Buddhist temple whose summer Bon Dance still lights the shore each year. Up and down Baldwin Avenue, the false-front wooden storefronts of the plantation era went up — the same buildings, weathered and repainted, that give the town its look a century later.
It found that life in the counterculture. Through the 1960s and 1970s a wave of artists, surfers and free spirits drifted in and claimed the sleepy sugar town as their unofficial capital. The pastel storefronts filled with galleries, boutiques and a now-legendary natural-foods market on Baldwin Avenue; on the one main street, old-school hippies, professional surfers and new-age wanderers brushed shoulders. The vibe turned barefoot and bohemian, a slice of the Summer of Love frozen on a Hawaiian shore. Pāʻia became "the hippest little town on Maui," and the easygoing, salt-tousled feel from those years never left.
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.
