The Most Beautiful Places in Hawaii
10 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Hawaii are Maunakea Observatories, Haleakalā and Waimea Canyon State Park. The list covers 10 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Hawaii is the most remote island chain of its size on Earth, built one island at a time as the Pacific Plate drifts over a volcanic hotspot. That process explains its range of scenery: the youngest island still grows from active lava flows, while the older islands to the northwest have been carved by rain into deep canyons and fluted sea cliffs. Few places show the whole life cycle of a volcanic island so clearly within a few hours' flight.
On the Island of Hawaiʻi, Kīlauea is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and Maunakea rises so high above the clouds that its summit hosts some of the world's leading astronomical observatories. Papakōlea is one of very few green sand beaches anywhere, coloured by olivine eroded from a cinder cone, and Akaka Falls drops into a gorge of thick rainforest. Waipiʻo Valley opens to the sea between steep walls on the island's northern coast.
On Maui, the summit of Haleakalā holds a vast eroded basin of cinder cones and coloured ash. Kauaʻi, the oldest of the main islands, offers Waimea Canyon with its red and green layered walls and the Nā Pali Coast, where knife-edge ridges fall straight into the ocean. On Oʻahu, Hanauma Bay is a flooded volcanic crater whose reef shelters a protected marine life preserve.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maunakea Observatories | Observatory | |
| 2 | Haleakalā | Volcano | |
| 3 | Waimea Canyon State Park | Canyon | |
| 4 | Kīlauea | Volcano | |
| 5 | Nā Pali Coast | Cliff | |
| 6 | Hanauma Bay | Coral reef | |
| 7 | USS Missouri | Museum ship | |
| 8 | Papakolea Beach | Beach | |
| 9 | Waipiʻo Valley | Canyon | |
| 10 | Akaka Falls State Park | Waterfall |
01 Maunakea Observatories
United States19.822° N 155.475° W
Image by doctor-a from Pixabay Near the summit of Mauna Kea, at about 4,200 metres, a cluster of white and silver domes stands on red-brown cinder cones high above the cloud layer. This is one of the world's great observatory sites: twelve facilities housing thirteen telescopes, including the twin 10-metre mirrors of the W. M.
Did you know? Canada and France agreed in 1973 to build the 3.6-metre telescope that they operate jointly with the University of Hawaiʻi.
02 Haleakalā
United States · 32.7 km from Wailuku20.718° N 156.250° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Haleakalā is the great shield volcano of East Maui, rising to 3,055 metres (10,023 ft).
Did you know? Haleakalā has erupted about ten times in the past thousand years and is the only volcano on Maui still considered active.
03 Waimea Canyon State Park
United States · 31.8 km from Līhuʻe22.056° N 159.665° W
Image by TeamHealthy808 from Pixabay Fourteen miles long, a mile wide in places, and cut more than 3,600 feet deep, Waimea Canyon is what happens when millennia of runoff from Mount Waiʻaleʻale — one of the wettest spots on the planet — pours down the same channels again and again.
Did you know? Geologists date Kauaʻi's lavas to about five million years ago and the great collapse that shaped the canyon to roughly four million years ago.
04 Kīlauea
United States · 38.2 km from Hilo19.421° N 155.287° W
Patricia Martín Nieto · CC BY-SA 4.0 Kīlauea is the youngest volcano on Hawaiʻi Island to have broken the surface and one of the most persistently active on the planet.
Did you know? The 1983–2018 eruption at Puʻu ʻŌʻō was one of the longest on Earth; by 2016 it had added about 179 hectares of new land to the island.
05 Nā Pali Coast
Nā Pali Coast State Park
United States · 36.3 km from Līhuʻe22.183° N 159.642° W
Jmblanco74 · CC BY-SA 3.0 On the north-west side of Kauaʻi the land ends in a wall of fluted green cliffs that rise as much as 4,000 feet straight out of the Pacific.
Did you know? Producer Dino De Laurentiis liked the coast so much that he shot all the beach scenes of the 1976 King Kong at Honopū and Kalalau.
06 Hanauma Bay
United States · 17.6 km from Honolulu21.269° N 157.693° W
Image by photosforyou from Pixabay Hanauma Bay is a volcanic crater that the ocean has broken into. On the southeast shore of Oʻahu, a curving ring of tuff cliffs encloses a sheltered bay with a crescent of sand at the back and a fringing coral reef just offshore, so that from the rim the whole bowl can be taken in at a glance.
Did you know? Archaeologists have found fishing tools here, though the lack of fresh water meant Hawaiians never settled the bay.
07 USS Missouri
United States · 11.8 km from Honolulu21.362° N 157.953° W
National Museum of the U.S. Navy · Public domain USS Missouri, known as the "Mighty Mo", was the last battleship ever commissioned by the United States and now lies at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor as a museum ship. An Iowa-class battleship completed in 1944, she is 270 metres long, with nine 16-inch guns in three turrets.
08 Papakolea Beach
United States18.936° N 155.646° W
Pushkr from , United States · CC BY 2.0 The sand at Papakolea is green because a volcanic cone is quietly falling apart above it. The headland enclosing the beach is a littoral cone built from an old Mauna Loa-era eruption, rich in olivine — a dense, iron-and-magnesium silicate that's among the very first minerals to crystallize as volcanic magma cools.
Did you know? Gem-quality olivine is known as peridot, and in Hawaii the green crystals have long been nicknamed Hawaiian diamonds.
09 Waipiʻo Valley
United States20.120° N 155.593° W
Image by SocialButterflyMMG from Pixabay Waipiʻo is a deep, flat-floored valley cut into the windward coast of the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, in the old district of Hāmākua.
Did you know? When missionaries William Ellis and Asa Thurston arrived in 1823, Ellis counted 265 dwellings and estimated about 1,300 people living on the valley floor.
10 Akaka Falls State Park
United States · 18.1 km from Hilo19.854° N 155.154° W
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay ʻAkaka Falls drops 442 feet (about 135 metres) in a single, nearly unbroken column into a deep, densely overgrown gorge on the windward flank of Hawaiʻi Island.
Did you know? Studies show the goby's larvae drift down to the sea more often during new-moon phases, before returning as juveniles to climb back up.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Hawaii?
- On our list, Maunakea Observatories ranks first, followed by Haleakalā and Waimea Canyon State Park.
- Why does Hawaii have active volcanoes?
- Hawaii sits above a hotspot in the middle of the Pacific Plate. As the plate moves northwest, older islands drift away from the hotspot and go extinct, while new volcanoes such as Kīlauea form over it.
- Why is the sand green at Papakōlea Beach?
- The sand is rich in olivine, a green mineral eroded from the volcanic cone that surrounds the bay. Olivine is denser than other grains, so it stays on the beach while lighter material washes away.
- Is Maunakea taller than Mount Everest?
- Measured from its base on the ocean floor, Maunakea is over 10,000 metres tall, more than Everest. Its summit, however, stands about 4,207 metres above sea level.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Hawaii?
- In our collection, the places in Hawaii are most often canyons and gorges (2), volcanoes (2), mountains (1) and cliffs (1).
- How many places are on this list in Hawaii?
- The list covers 10 places.