Long before the resorts, Native Hawaiians lived along this shore for centuries, drawn by sheltered swimming coves, reef fishing, and fertile land just inland. Kauaʻi was also the first Hawaiian island reached by Europeans — Captain James Cook made landfall at Waimea, west of Poʻipū, in 1778. For a generation afterward the island kept its own ruler, King Kaumualiʻi, the last independent king in the Hawaiian Islands, before Kauaʻi joined the unified Hawaiian Kingdom in 1810.
Just up the road from Poʻipū sits Kōloa, where in 1835 the firm of Ladd & Company opened Hawaiʻi's first commercially successful sugar plantation. It was the start of something far larger than one mill. Over the decades that followed, workers arrived from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Portugal, and Puerto Rico to work the cane, and that gathering of arrivals became the foundation of modern Hawaiʻi's blended, multicultural community. Kōloa's plantation era ran for more than a century and a half, and you can still walk straight into it today.
Why People Visit Poʻipū
Poʻipū rewards visitors who want Hawaiʻi at its sunniest and most easygoing — a warm, protected coast with a century of south-shore history behind it. People come for Poʻipū Beach and the Spouting Horn, for the gardens and the golf, and for the plantation-era streets of Old Kōloa Town, where the Garden Isle's layered past sits a short walk from the sand.
