🇺🇸 United States · Hawaii
Honolulu is the gateway to Hawaii and one of the most singular cities in the United States: a tropical capital in the middle of the Pacific, where high-rises look out over Waikiki Beach, green mountains drop toward the sea and Hawaiian, Asian and American cultures live side by side. Set on the south coast of the island of Oahu, it holds most of the state's population and works as its political, economic and cultural center.
For the traveler, Honolulu is several things at once: the classic beach destination of Waikiki, with its strip of hotels, beginner surf and sunsets; the historic pilgrimage to Pearl Harbor, where the United States entered the Second World War; and a downtown with royal palaces, markets and one of the most fused food scenes in the country, a mix of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese and Hawaiian flavors.
This guide runs through the essentials of Honolulu and Oahu with a practical eye: where to stay, what to see in the city and around it, how to climb the Diamond Head crater, how to organize a Pearl Harbor visit, what to eat and how to get around. It is the ideal base for starting to discover Hawaii before hopping to wilder islands such as Maui, Kauai or the Big Island.
Honolulu, whose name means 'sheltered bay' in Hawaiian, was for centuries a Hawaiian settlement that grew in importance when its natural harbor drew whalers and traders in the 19th century. King Kamehameha III made it the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1845, and the city witnessed the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 and annexation by the United States. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941, marked its history and the world's. Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959. 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.
In less than a century, Honolulu went from a village of Hawaiian fishermen to the capital of a kingdom with its own palace, and from there to the setting of the attack that pulled the United States into the Second World War. Few cities in the world pack so many turns of history into so little time, and it all started for one simple reason: its bay. The name Honolulu means 'sheltered bay' or 'protected place' in Hawaiian, a reference to its exceptional natural harbor, one of the few safe anchorages on the coast of Oahu. Long before Europeans arrived, the area was a Hawaiian settlement embedded in a highly developed social and agricultural system, with taro (kalo) fields, fisheries and communities organized around the chiefs (aliʻi) under the concept of the ahupuaʻa, the land divisions running from mountain to sea.
Polynesians had settled the Hawaiian archipelago centuries earlier, in successive waves of navigation from other Pacific islands, developing a culture of their own, with its language, its religion and its system of taboos (kapu). Oahu was one of the main islands, and the Honolulu region, though initially less prominent than other centers of power, was destined to be transformed once foreign ships discovered the virtues of its bay.
The turn came at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, when Western navigators — following the voyages of Captain James Cook, who reached the archipelago in 1778 — began to frequent the islands. The harbor of Honolulu, deep and protected, proved ideal for anchoring ships, and the small village quickly began to grow as a stopover and trading point in the middle of the Pacific, sowing the seed of the future capital.
At the beginning of the 19th century, King Kamehameha I managed to unify the Hawaiian islands under his rule, creating the Kingdom of Hawaii. Trade with whalers, sandalwood merchants and passing ships made Honolulu an ever busier port, with a growing presence of foreigners, Protestant missionaries (arriving from 1820) and traders who transformed the island economy and society.
In 1845, King Kamehameha III officially moved the kingdom's capital to Honolulu, cementing its central role. The city filled with buildings that reflected that double identity, Hawaiian and Western: coral stone churches such as Kawaiahaʻo, royal residences and, later, Iolani Palace, opened in 1882 under King Kalakaua. Iolani Palace remains today the only royal palace built in what is now United States territory, a symbol of the kingdom's sovereignty.
The Hawaiian monarchy faced enormous pressures: epidemics that decimated the Native population, the growing economic power of sugar planters of American and European origin, and political disputes. In 1893, a group of businessmen and settlers, with the support of American troops, overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, the kingdom's last monarch. After a brief period as a republic, Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898, putting an end to the archipelago's independence.
A good part of what makes Honolulu unique today — its fusion cooking, its Japanese, Chinese and Filipino surnames, its multicultural feel — was born of one plant: sugar cane. From the mid-19th century, the sugar industry became the economic engine of the kingdom, and then of the territory, with enormous plantations that needed vast amounts of labor that the Hawaiian population, decimated by epidemics, could not supply.
The sugar companies — the famous 'Big Five' that would dominate the island economy — then recruited workers in waves from all over the world: Chinese from the 1850s, Japanese from 1885 (who would become the largest group), Portuguese from Madeira and the Azores, Puerto Ricans, Koreans and, in the 20th century, Filipinos. Each community brought its language, its food, its festivals and its temples, and on the plantations a lingua franca even emerged, Hawaiian 'pidgin', so the groups could understand one another.
Out of that mixture came modern Hawaiian society, one of the most diverse in the United States, where no ethnic group is a majority. The 'plate lunch', poke, spam musubi, Honolulu's Buddhist festivals, the oldest Chinatown in the country: all are living inheritances from that melting pot. Understanding the history of sugar is understanding why Honolulu resembles no other American city.
After annexation, Honolulu and Oahu took on enormous strategic weight for the United States as a military base in the middle of the Pacific. The great roadstead of Pearl Harbor, west of the city, became the main naval base of the Pacific Fleet, with shipyards, depots and an anchorage for the big battleships.
On the morning of 7 December 1941, aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on the base. In under two hours, they sank or damaged numerous ships — among them the battleship USS Arizona, which exploded and sank with more than a thousand crew aboard —, destroyed hundreds of aircraft and caused more than 2,400 deaths. The attack, described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as 'a date which will live in infamy', dragged the United States into the Second World War.
Today, the USS Arizona Memorial stands over the sunken hull of the battleship, where the remains of the sailors still rest, and the Pearl Harbor complex — with the battleship USS Missouri, aboard which Japan signed the surrender in 1945, closing the conflict — is one of the most visited sites of remembrance in the country. The war also transformed Hawaiian society, with the imposition of martial law and an enormous military deployment that left lasting marks.
After the war, Hawaii went through a period of strong growth. The rise of commercial aviation and, later, of jet flights brought the archipelago closer to the mainland and sent tourism soaring, with Waikiki turned into a mass destination and an emblem of the American tropical vacation. In 1959, Hawaii was formally admitted to the Union as the 50th state of the United States, and Honolulu became its capital.
The city grew vertically: the hotels and towers of Waikiki, the downtown financial district and new neighborhoods transformed the urban landscape. Honolulu established itself as the state's political, economic, military and cultural center, the seat of state government and of a deeply multicultural population, mixing Native Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, Korean and mainland American ancestry, with no clearly dominant group.
In recent decades a Hawaiian cultural renaissance movement has gathered strength: revitalization of the language, music, hula dance and traditional navigation, alongside an open debate on sovereignty and recognition of Native peoples. Honolulu today balances its role as a major American city and a global tourist destination with pride in being the heart of a unique Pacific culture, where the spirit of 'aloha' remains a mark of identity.