Today Wailea is five crescent beaches in a row — Keawakapu, Mokapu, Ulua, Wailea, and Polo — strung together by a mile and a half of shoreline path, with resorts, golf, and shops where scrubland once ran. Matson Navigation bought those fifteen hundred acres in 1957; Alexander & Baldwin and Northwestern Mutual built the planned coast in 1971. The crescents and the reef are older than any of it, and the goddess’s water still runs to the same shore. Wear the history, and carry a little of it home.
Then, for a few years, the quiet coast became a drill ground. During the Second World War the Marines trained along this shore for the island campaigns of the Pacific, and they gave Ulua Beach a grim nickname: “Little Tarawa,” after the atoll where they would make one of the war’s bloodiest amphibious landings. Men who rehearsed in this gentle surf carried its lessons to the far side of the ocean. Today the beach is back to umbrellas and snorkels, the name remembered mostly by those who go looking for it.
Why People Visit Wailea, Hawaiʻi
Wailea offers a seamless beach-and-path experience: swimming, snorkeling, strolling, and light shopping between coves. It is sunny, refined, and family friendly, with year-round appeal in its beaches, walkways, and public access. Natural beauty and easy comfort sit side by side, and a deep Hawaiian past — the goddess Lea, the fishing shore of Kahamanini, the Marines’ “Little Tarawa” — runs quietly beneath the polish.
