Hawai'i
Hawai'i Facts Videos Maps
Photo: Hawai’i
Kauai's Na Pali coast is a breathtaking array of cliffs, waterfalls, and steep narrow valleys plunging to the sea. Access to the roadless area is by boat or via a rugged hiking trail.
Photograph by Susan Poulton
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Hawai'i Information and History

More than six million vacationers, most of them from the continental U.S. or Japan, spend close to 11 billion dollars a year in this tropical archipelago. Defense, centered on U.S. military bases at Pearl Harbor, is the second largest moneymaker. Descendants of Asians, who immigrated in the 19th and early 20th century to work on sugar plantations, add to the mix of people in this only state with no ethnic majority: Caucasians constitute 24 percent; Japanese, 18 percent; Filipino, 12 percent. The remainder includes ethnic Chinese and those of Hawaiian ancestry. Ecologists estimate that 89 percent of Hawaii's flowering plants and 97 percent of its land animals—among them the world's only predatory caterpillars—exist nowhere else on Earth.

ECONOMY

Industry: tourism, trade, finance, food processing, petroleum refining, stone, clay, and glass products.
Agriculture: sugarcane, pineapples, nursery stock, tropical fruit, livestock, macadamia nuts.

Text source: National Geographic Atlas of the World, Eighth Edition, 2004
Hawai'i Flag and Fast Facts
Flag of Hawai'i
Area
28,311 square kilometers
(10,931 square miles)
Population
1,257,608
Capital
Honolulu; 378,155
Per Capita Income
U.S. $30,040
Date Statehood Achieved
August 21, 1959
Hawai'i Features
Photo: Laysan albatross chick
Beyond the Hawai'i of human domain, the island chain stretches into an older world where wildlife reigns, vibrant and vulnerable.
Photo: volcano at twilight, Hawai'i
Restless deities, lakes of fire, the newest land on Earth: Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park never sleeps. Read article and see photos.
Photo: Hula Hawai‘i
Understand the importance of the hula. Once forced underground, the dance is now celebrated as an intrinsic part of Hawaiian culture.
Photo: Hawai’i, Waipio Valley
Travel to Hawai’i and discover the island's true heart—it's not just white-sand beaches and year-round sunshine.
Map: Hawai'i
State: Hawai'i
Country: United States
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