Kualoa Ranch

Kualoa was sacred before it was famous. The ahupuaʻa — the traditional Hawaiian land division running from the coral reefs to the top of the fluted Koʻolau cliffs — was one of the most kapu places on Oʻahu: a puʻuhonua, a place of refuge, and a school for the aliʻi. When a chief was in residence, canoes passing offshore lowered their sails from Makawai to Kaʻaʻawa in respect. Young chiefs were sent to Kualoa to be trained in the traditions; the land was coveted by kings precisely because it was holy.

Dr. Gerrit Judd, a missionary physician who renounced his American citizenship to serve the Hawaiian Kingdom, bought the land from Kamehameha III in 1850. His descendants — now in their sixth, seventh, and eighth generations — still own it. The valley was a sugar plantation, then a WWII airfield whose runway was bulldozed back into pasture, then a cattle ranch, and then, starting in the 1990s, the most filmed landscape in the Pacific: Jurassic Park's valley, Kong's island, Jumanji, Lost — seventy-plus productions in what Hollywood calls 'Hawaii's backlot.'

The ranch operates as a private nature reserve now — movie tours funding the stewardship of four thousand acres of sacred land, including Moliʻi Fishpond, an eight-hundred-year-old aquaculture system still working at the edge of Kaneohe Bay. The tourists come for the dinosaurs; the land was famous for a thousand years before the cameras arrived.