🇺🇸 United States · Hawaii
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is one of the most extraordinary places in the United States: somewhere you can watch the Earth being made. It protects two of the most active volcanoes on the planet, Kilauea and the colossal Mauna Loa, and an overwhelming landscape of smoking craters, calderas, lava fields, lava tubes and rainforest growing on newly formed rock.
Listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site and a biosphere reserve, the park is at once a living geological laboratory, a refuge for endemic species and a deeply sacred place in Hawaiian culture: the Halemaumau crater on Kilauea is, by tradition, the home of Pele, goddess of fire and volcanoes. When there is an eruption, watching the reddish glow of the lava — above all at night — is unforgettable.
This guide runs through the essentials of the park with a practical eye: the overlooks on the Kilauea caldera, Crater Rim Drive and the Chain of Craters Road that drops to the sea, walks through craters and lava tubes, how and when to see volcanic activity, and the precautions you cannot skip. One key warning: volcanic activity is unpredictable and constantly changing, so always check the park's official alerts before your visit.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park was created in 1916, becoming one of the country's first national parks and the first in Hawaii. It takes in the Kilauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes, around which Hawaiian culture has woven, over centuries, a rich heritage of chants and legends centered on the goddess Pele. The park is also home to the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, a pioneer of modern volcanology since the early 20th century. Recent eruptions, such as Kilauea's in 2018, have dramatically transformed the landscape. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The volcanic archipelago of the Pacific: cradle of an ancient Polynesian kingdom unified by Kamehameha, scene of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the only island and tropical state in the country, a paradise of surfing, of aloha and of active volcanoes.
Read the history of Hawaii →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Picture a place where the ground breathes, where the rock is still hot underfoot and where, according to the people who live there, a goddess reveals herself every time the earth spits fire. That place exists and you can visit it: it is the summit of Kilauea. Long before there was a national park, the Kilauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes held a central place in the Hawaiian worldview. By tradition, the goddess Pele — deity of fire, lightning, wind and volcanoes — lives in the Halemaumau crater, at the summit of Kilauea. Every eruption, every river of lava and every new flow is understood as a manifestation of Pele, who both destroys and creates land. Around her exists a vast body of chants (mele), dances (hula), genealogies and legends recounting her journeys through the archipelago, her loves and her quarrels, especially with her sister Namakaokahai, goddess of the sea.
This relationship is not merely mythological but deeply ritual: Hawaiians take offerings to Pele, recite chants and observe protocols of respect at the volcanic sites, which are considered sacred (wahi pana). That is where the well-known warning — and the tourist superstition attached to it — against taking lava rocks from the park comes from, as well as the request from Native communities that the place be treated with reverence.
The volcanic landscape was also a vital resource: lava provided stone for tools and building, and the pockets of forest (kipuka) that survive between the flows were a source of plants, birds and materials. So the volcanoes were at once deity, home and sustenance, an integration of the sacred and the everyday that is characteristic of Hawaiian culture.
Scientific interest in the Hawaiian volcanoes grew in the 19th century, with visitors and scholars drawn by the exceptional accessibility of Kilauea, one of the few volcanoes in the world where activity could be observed close up with relative safety. The historic Volcano House, a hotel on the caldera rim, hosted famous travelers and writers — among them Mark Twain — who spread the fame of the place.
A fundamental milestone was the founding, in 1912, of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, driven by the geologist Thomas Jaggar. The observatory turned Kilauea into a kind of natural laboratory for modern volcanology, where pioneering methods of monitoring volcanic activity were developed and later applied all over the world. Today it is run by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
In 1916, the United States Congress created Hawaii National Park, which originally included the volcanoes of the Big Island together with Haleakala on Maui; it was one of the country's first national parks and the first in Hawaii. In 1961, the two were split into independent parks, and today's Hawaii Volcanoes National Park was born. Through the 20th century, the park was recognized as a biosphere reserve (1980) and declared a Unesco World Heritage Site (1987), on the strength of its exceptional geological, ecological and scenic value.
The park's history is marked by eruptions, which continually transform its geography. Kilauea is one of the most active volcanoes on the planet; between 1983 and 2018 it staged an almost continuous eruption from its east rift zone (Puu Oo), which for decades poured lava toward the sea, buried roads, communities and beaches, and at the same time added kilometers of new land to the island.
In 2018, Kilauea went through a dramatic episode: activity shifted to lower Puna, outside the park, where abundant lava flows destroyed hundreds of homes and entire neighborhoods. At the same time, at the summit, the lava lake in the Halemaumau crater drained and a series of explosions and collapses enlarged and profoundly reshaped the caldera, damaging park infrastructure (including the Jaggar Museum and stretches of Crater Rim Drive) and forcing a long closure and reorganization.
Since then, Kilauea has erupted intermittently at its summit again, with new lava lakes forming and glows that have drawn crowds. Mauna Loa, for its part, after almost forty years of quiet, erupted again at the end of 2022. And since 23 December 2024, Kilauea has been staging an episodic eruption inside Halemaumau: in cycles of weeks, spectacular episodes of lava fountaining follow one another (by mid-2026 dozens of episodes had already been counted), separated by pauses, which have given the park back the nighttime glow that made it famous. These episodes are a reminder that the park protects one of the most geologically alive regions on Earth, where the landscape — and visitor access — changes to the unpredictable rhythm of the volcanoes, which makes it essential always to check the current official information from the USGS and the NPS before visiting.
The very existence of the Hawaiian Islands — and of their volcanoes — is explained by a geological phenomenon called a 'hotspot': a column of magma that rises from deep in the Earth's mantle and stays more or less fixed while the Pacific tectonic plate drifts slowly over it toward the northwest. As the plate moves, the hotspot punches through the crust and creates, one after another, the volcanoes that form the Hawaiian island chain. That is why the Big Island, the youngest and sitting right over the hotspot, holds the active volcanoes — Kilauea and Mauna Loa — while the islands to the northwest are progressively older and more eroded.
The park's volcanoes are of the 'shield' type: broad and gently sloped, formed by successive flows of very fluid basaltic lava that spread over great distances instead of piling up into a steep cone. It is that fluidity that makes Hawaiian eruptions generally more effusive than explosive, and that allows them to be observed with relative safety. Offshore to the southeast, the chain's next volcano is already growing, Kamaehuakanaloa (formerly called Loihi), still submerged.
On the bare, apparently sterile rock, life returns with astonishing tenacity: the amaumau fern and other pioneer plants colonize the cooled flows, and in the 'kipuka' — islands of old forest that the lava surrounded without burying — unique endemic species survive, such as native birds (honeycreepers) and the nēnē, the Hawaiian goose, the state's symbol bird. The park thus protects not only a geological spectacle but one of the most singular and fragile island ecosystems in the world, threatened by invasive species.