Kaʻanapali Beach

Kaʻanapali is five kilometres of west-facing beach north of Lahaina on Maui, with Puʻu Kekaʻa — Black Rock — dividing it near the northern end. It was sugar plantation land until the 1960s, when it was developed as the first master-planned resort in Hawaii, and everything behind the sand dates from then or later.

It set a pattern. The plan put hotels along the shore with a public boardwalk in front of them, shops behind, and golf inland — an arrangement copied across the Pacific. Black Rock carries older meaning: in Hawaiian tradition it is a place where souls departed the world, and the nightly torch-lighting and cliff dive performed there since 1963 is a staged version of a story attached to Kahekili, the last ruling chief of Maui.

The shore is golden sand with a moderate slope and, at Black Rock, coral and fish close enough to snorkel from the beach — unusual for a resort shore of this scale. The water is generally calm in summer and can produce a shore break in winter when north swells wrap in. Sea turtles are common around the rock. Whales are the other seasonal feature: humpbacks calve in the Auʻau Channel between Maui, Lānaʻi and Molokaʻi from about December to April, and they are visible from the sand without a boat, which is unusual anywhere.

Development is dense and orderly: a line of large hotels and condominiums, a shopping centre, and a paved boardwalk running the length of the beach that anyone may use. As everywhere in Hawaii the sand is public, and there are marked public access paths and parking between the properties — worth knowing, because the resorts do not advertise them.

Hawaii's first master-planned resort, built on a former plantation in 1962, and the model that most of the Pacific copied afterwards. The beach is public to the high-water mark with marked access and parking between the hotels. Black Rock at the northern end is the snorkelling and the cliff dive ceremony at sunset.