Hanauma Bay
Interesting facts
- At the height of its popularity the bay received more than three million visitors a year.
- Before 2020 roughly 412 pounds of sunscreen entered the water each day, and ocean models suggest it takes about 50 hours to flush out.
- In the 1970s the city shipped in white sand from Oʻahu's North Shore to enlarge the beach.
- Archaeologists have found fishing tools here, though the lack of fresh water meant Hawaiians never settled the bay.
- Hawaiians also used the crater rim as a lookout for navigating the often rough channel between Oʻahu and Molokaʻi.
- Besides Blue Hawaii, the bay appears in Paradise, Hawaiian Style and in episodes of Hawaii Five-O and Magnum, P.I.; commercial filming was banned in 1990.
- After protection began in 1967, volunteers set up a booth on the beach to teach visitors about the reef, a forerunner of today's education centre.
- In 2014 and 2015 nearly half of the bay's corals bleached and close to a tenth of them died.
Why it is worth it
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.
The crater formed about 32,000 years ago during the Honolulu Volcanic Series, the last round of eruptions on the island. Vents opened on the sea floor, and where rising magma met seawater, steam explosions blasted it into fine ash that built up into a ring and hardened into tuff, with shattered pieces of coral and basalt trapped inside. Over time the waves wore through the low southeastern wall and let the sea in. The Hawaiian name is usually explained as "curved bay", after its outline or the canoes once launched here, though some link it instead to uma, a traditional hand-wrestling game.
With no fresh water nearby, the bay was never settled, but Hawaiian nobility, including Kamehameha I and Queen Kaʻahumanu, came here to fish, entertain guests and hold games. The City and County of Honolulu later bought the land from the Bernice Pauahi Bishop estate and opened it to the public. After the attack on Pearl Harbor the beach was strung with barbed wire and given a sentry bunker, and in 1956 part of the reef was blasted to lay a telephone cable to the mainland. Films such as Blue Hawaii and Tora! Tora! Tora! used the bay as a backdrop.
In 1967 the bay was placed under full protection, from fish and coral to the sand itself, and it became the first of Hawaii's Marine Life Conservation Districts. Its waters hold around 400 species of fish, among them many parrotfish, and young green sea turtles, which grow up here and nest far away at French Frigate Shoals. Crowds of the 1980s, when up to 13,000 people could arrive in a single day, killed the reef nearest the beach. Since then the site has been managed as the Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve, and a marine education centre at the entrance, opened in 2002, introduces the ecology of the reef.
Getting there
Hanauma Bay lies on the southeast coast of Oʻahu, about 3 km from the Honolulu neighbourhood of Hawaiʻi Kai. The nearest airport is Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL), about 25 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Hanauma is a marine embayment formed within a tuff ring and located along the southeast coast of the Island of Oʻahu in the Hawaii Kai neighborhood of East Honolulu, in the Hawaiian Islands.
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