10 Best Places to Visit in Hawaii in 2026

The northwest shore of Kauai belongs to another geological era. Sheer green cliffs rise hundreds of meters straight from the ocean, their faces folded like enormous curtains of moss and stone, streaked with thin white waterfalls that appear and vanish depending on the season. There are no roads here. No hotels. No beach bars. The Na Pali Coast exists entirely on its own terms, and that is precisely why it sits at the top of this list.

Most visitors encounter Na Pali from the water on a catamaran or zodiac tour out of Port Allen or Hanalei Bay, which gives you the full vertical drama of the cliffs from sea level. In winter, the northern approach from Hanalei is restricted due to heavy swells, so boats then depart from the calmer south shore. The view from the water in summer, when the sun hits the ridgeline in early morning, is something a photograph will gesture toward but never quite capture.

Hikers can access the coast on foot via the Kalalau Trail, one of the most demanding and celebrated coastal trails in the United States. The full eleven-mile route to Kalalau Beach requires a backcountry permit and at least one overnight stay. The first two miles to Hanakapi'ai Beach are open as a day hike and give a strong sense of the terrain without the logistical commitment of the full route. The trail threads through valleys thick with ironwood and guava, crossing stream beds that can rise dangerously fast after rain.

A helicopter tour offers the third way in, revealing the inland valleys and hidden waterfalls that neither hikers nor boaters can see. The Honopu Valley, sometimes called the Valley of the Lost Tribe, is only visible from the air or sea and has reportedly never had a formal trail cut through it.

There is no other place on American soil where you can watch a continent being born. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park covers 333,000 acres of the Big Island and contains two of the world's most active volcanoes: Kilauea and Mauna Loa. Kilauea has been erupting almost continuously in various forms since 1983, a volcanic career that has added hundreds of acres of new land to the island's southeastern coastline.

The park experience varies enormously depending on current volcanic activity, which the United States Geological Survey monitors and reports daily. During active summit eruptions, the Halema'uma'u crater glows orange at night and fills the air with sulfur dioxide, turning the caldera into something from a science fiction film. During quieter periods, the landscape still communicates the depth of geological time through its sheer strangeness: lava tubes you can walk through, sulfur banks where the ground exhales yellow mineral deposits, and a coastal section where black lava flows meet the Pacific in clouds of steam.

The Thurston Lava Tube, known in Hawaiian as Nahuku, is one of the park's most accessible wonders. Created roughly 500 years ago when the outer shell of a lava flow cooled and hardened while molten rock continued moving through the interior, the tube stretches through the jungle like a cathedral of solidified fire. Lamps illuminate the passage, but the effect remains otherworldly.

Chain of Craters Road descends 3,700 feet from the summit caldera to the coast in a series of switchbacks past petroglyphs, ancient pit craters, and the remains of lava flows that buried the original road. The drive takes an hour each way and covers some of the most visually arresting terrain in the national park system.

The Hana Highway runs for 52 miles along the northeastern coast of Maui from Kahului to the small town of Hana, crossing 59 bridges, most of them single-lane, and climbing through some of the greenest terrain in the Hawaiian Islands. It is genuinely one of the most beautiful drives in the world, and it is also genuinely one of the most misunderstood.

Most visitors treat the road as a list of checkboxes to sprint through. The correct approach is the opposite: pick five or six stops, linger at each, and let the journey itself be the destination. The road passes through rainforest so dense that even on bright days the canopy filters sunlight into something green and diffuse. Waterfalls appear around bends with no warning. The smell of wild ginger rises from the roadside in waves.

The Twin Falls area near mile marker four is an early highlight with a short walk into a forest of bamboo and taro, ending at a clear pool beneath a two-tier waterfall. Further along, the Garden of Eden Arboretum holds over 500 labeled species of tropical and subtropical plants on a hillside with ocean views. Wai'anapanapa State Park, about four miles before Hana, contains the most photographed stretch of black sand beach in Hawaii, where the volcanic sand against aquamarine water produces a color contrast that seems artificially intensified.

The town of Hana itself is small and deliberately unhurried, a farming and ranching community that has resisted the resort development that transformed western Maui. The Hana Cultural Center and Museum gives context to the area's history. Past Hana, the road continues to the Kipahulu section of Haleakala National Park, where the Pools of Oheo, a series of freshwater pools connected by a stream descending from the upper slopes, justify the extra forty minutes of driving.

Waikiki can feel overwhelming on a first encounter: the high-rise hotels, the dense foot traffic along Kalakaua Avenue, the constant low roar of a place that never fully stops. It takes about one evening to understand why this two-mile stretch of beach has been the center of Hawaiian tourism for more than a century.

The ocean in Waikiki is genuinely exceptional for learning water sports. The bay's natural break produces long, gentle waves ideal for surfing instruction, and the area has been associated with surfing culture since the early twentieth century when Duke Kahanamoku, a Native Hawaiian Olympic swimmer and surfer, popularized the sport here and eventually introduced it to the world. A bronze statue of Kahanamoku stands on the beachfront, perpetually draped in flower leis by visitors who understand the magnitude of that contribution to global beach culture.

Diamond Head, the volcanic tuff cone that frames Waikiki's eastern skyline, offers a moderately demanding 1.8-mile round-trip hike to its 232-meter summit through a series of tunnels, stairs, and open switchbacks originally built for military observation in the early twentieth century. The panoramic view from the top takes in the full arc of Honolulu from the Waianae Mountains in the west to Koko Head in the east. Advance reservations are required; online booking typically fills two to three weeks ahead for preferred morning slots.

The area around Waikiki is also where Duke's Canoe Club, one of the finest ocean-view restaurants on the island, serves fresh local fish on the beachfront, and where the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, known locally as the Pink Palace, has been welcoming guests in its signature flamingo-colored towers since 1927.

Mark Twain's famous description of Waimea Canyon as the Grand Canyon of the Pacific is accurate enough in scale but misses the most important difference: Waimea is alive in a way the Arizona original is not. Red and ochre cliff walls glow against streaks of green vegetation that push down into the canyon from above, and waterfalls appear in white threads across the far walls after rain. The canyon stretches over 14 miles in length and drops to a depth of more than 1,000 meters.

The main lookout points along Waimea Canyon Drive reward visitors who plan their timing carefully. Mornings before 10 a.m. typically deliver the clearest views before afternoon clouds drift in from the ocean. Pu'u Hinahina Lookout, a few kilometers past the main canyon overlook, offers a second perspective that includes a window onto the Waimea River valley below and, on clear days, the island of Ni'ihau on the horizon.

Hikers willing to descend into the canyon floor can take the Waimea Canyon Trail, a steep round-trip of roughly fourteen kilometers that crosses the river several times and deposits you in the base of the canyon where the scale of the walls above becomes fully comprehensible. The canyon continues upward into Koke'e State Park, where cloud forest trails lead through native Hawaiian plants rarely seen at lower elevations.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy launched a surprise aerial attack on the United States Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans and drawing the country into World War II. Over two million people visit the Pearl Harbor National Memorial each year to stand above the hull of the USS Arizona, which still holds the remains of 1,102 of the 1,177 sailors and Marines killed when it sank that morning. The ship has been leaking a slow slick of oil into the harbor every day since 1941.

The memorial complex is more substantial than many visitors expect. The USS Arizona Memorial, reached by a short boat ride across the harbor, is the emotional center, but the nearby Battleship Missouri Memorial is equally significant: it was on Missouri's deck in Tokyo Bay that Japan signed the formal surrender documents that ended World War II on September 2, 1945. Visiting both in sequence creates a complete arc of the Pacific War from its catastrophic beginning to its close.

The Pearl Harbor Visitor Center and its associated museum provide context through photographs, artifacts, and first-person accounts from survivors on both sides of the attack. The tone throughout is measured and respectful toward all those who died, consistent with the site's status as an active military cemetery.

Haleakala means House of the Sun in Hawaiian, and the name comes from the legend that the demigod Maui climbed to this summit and lassoed the sun to slow its passage across the sky, giving farmers more daylight hours to dry their taro. Standing at the summit of this 3,055-meter dormant volcano before dawn, watching an ocean of cloud cover the lowlands while a ring of stars overhead slowly fades into a burning gradient of orange and pink, the story feels less like myth and more like eyewitness account.

The sunrise at Haleakala is among the most sought-after experiences in the Hawaiian Islands and requires some planning. A reservation through the national park website is mandatory for sunrise visitors, with a window between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. The drive from the Maui coast takes ninety minutes at minimum, which means departing around 3:30 a.m. from most resort areas. Temperatures at the summit regularly drop below 10 degrees Celsius even when the coast bakes at 30. Dressing in layers is not optional.

The crater floor is accessible on foot via several trails that descend into the otherworldly interior, where volcanic cinder cones in shades of rust, ochre, and charcoal rise from a landscape that trained NASA astronauts for lunar missions. The native silversword plant, which grows only on Haleakala and has been pushed back from the brink of extinction, dots the slopes with its alien silver-leafed rosettes.

The Kipahulu District, on the park's coastal flank east of Hana, provides a dramatically different face: lush, jungled, wet. The Pools of Oheo connect in a chain of freshwater pools that hikers can swim in when water levels are safe. The Pipiwai Trail through bamboo forest to Waimoku Falls, a 122-meter cascade, is among the finest short hikes on Maui.

Hanauma Bay is a curved bay formed inside the collapsed crater of a volcanic cone on Oahu's southeastern coastline. The crater's partial opening toward the sea created a protected lagoon with unusually calm, clear water and a reef ecosystem sheltering over 400 species of fish. State authorities manage the bay as a marine life conservation district, and the management regime here is genuinely serious: visitor numbers are capped, all guests must watch a mandatory marine education video before entering the water, no sunscreen except reef-safe formulas is permitted, and feeding fish or touching coral carries a fine.

The result of decades of conservation management is a reef that throbs with life in a way that freely accessed reefs in Hawaii no longer do. Green sea turtles rest on the sandy bottom in the shallows. Humuhumunukunukuapua'a, Hawaii's state fish, dart between coral heads. Schools of convict tang move like living clouds through the water column. On a clear morning with good visibility, snorkeling here is an experience that holds its own against any reef in the Pacific.

Advance reservations are required for all non-resident visitors and should be booked at least a week ahead. The bay closes on Tuesdays to give the reef a weekly rest from human presence, a conservation approach that several other Hawaiian marine reserves have since adopted.

The Kona Coast runs along the western side of the Big Island under what is probably the most reliably dry and sunny sky in Hawaii. While the eastern Hilo side of the island receives over 3,300 millimeters of rain per year, the Kona Coast averages closer to 400 millimeters, which is why the resorts congregate here and why the coffee farms that climb the slopes of Hualalai volcano above the town can ripen their beans in conditions that produce what many specialty coffee buyers consider the finest American-grown coffee in existence.

Kailua-Kona town itself is compact and walkable, the kind of place where you can genuinely spend a morning browsing local fish markets, trying malasadas from a roadside truck, and wandering down to Kamakahonu Beach where Kamehameha the Great, the king who first unified the Hawaiian Islands, spent the last years of his life in the early nineteenth century.

The manta ray night dive off Garden Eel Cove and Manta Village is among the most extraordinary wildlife encounters available anywhere in Hawaii. Snorkelers and divers float above powerful underwater lights that attract plankton, which in turn draws oceanic manta rays, some with wingspans exceeding five meters, that barrel-roll through the beam in slow, unhurried loops. The experience lasts about an hour and is conducted by several licensed operators out of Keauhou Bay.

Puuhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park, about 30 minutes south of Kailua-Kona, preserves one of the most important sites in Hawaiian culture: a place of refuge where, in ancient Hawaiian society, a person who had broken kapu could escape punishment by reaching the temple grounds and undergoing a ceremony of purification. The reconstructed temple platforms, royal fishponds, and carved wooden ki'i akua figures make this one of the most thoughtfully presented cultural heritage sites in the state.

Lanai is the smallest publicly accessible island in the Hawaiian chain and in some ways the most surprising. It was a pineapple plantation for most of the twentieth century, then became home to two of the most expensive hotels in the Pacific, and is today largely owned by Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who purchased 98 percent of the island in 2012. What all of this has produced is a place of deep contrasts: extraordinary luxury beside empty roads, pristine diving beside alien desert rock formations, and a small town center in Lanai City where residents still gather at the only grocery store most evenings.

Keahiakawelo, also known as the Garden of the Gods, is a plateau of eroded red and orange volcanic rock in the island's remote north that looks as though a miniature geological event happened here independent of everything else. The boulders are iron-rich and warm in color, and local children have for generations balanced smaller rocks into cairns that visitors add to with each passing year. Ancient Hawaiian oral tradition describes the site as the burned remains of a great ritual fire. The landscape is strange and beautiful and completely unlike any other place in the islands.

The snorkeling and diving off Lanai's western Hulopoe Bay is considered by many marine biologists to be the finest on any Hawaiian island. The bay is a state marine life conservation district with a resident pod of spinner dolphins that rests in its calm waters each morning after feeding at night. The underwater topography at the Cathedrals dive site, where lava tubes and overhangs have created a series of cavern rooms lit by filtered Pacific light, draws divers from across the globe.