Ka Lae, South Point

The southernmost ground in the fifty states, and a landmark district

Ka Lae, the point, is the southern tip of the island of Hawaiʻi and the southernmost ground in the fifty states: a flat, grassy, windswept plateau above high cliffs at the end of South Point Road, twelve miles off the Hawaii Belt Road, where the wind blows so steadily that trees grow bent almost flat. Below the cliffs ocean currents meet over deep water rich in ahi, mahimahi, marlin, red snapper and ulua, and locals still fish from the lava ledges. The same currents make it no place to swim. One is called the Halaea Current, after a chief it carried off to his death.

People have lived here for a very long time. Because the Big Island is the closest of the Hawaiian Islands to Tahiti, Ka Lae is widely thought to be where the first Polynesian voyagers landed, and the South Point Complex holds one of the longest archaeological records in the islands. In 1956 a Bishop Museum team digging in the Puʻu Aliʻi sand dune, the Hill of Chiefs, uncovered one of the oldest known Hawaiian dwellings, with the remains of a house, a hearth and more than 14,000 artefacts, among them coral and stone files for shaping fishhooks and over 60 kinds of large hooks. The site seems to have been used for fishing and living for more than a thousand years.

The fishermen's ingenuity is still written in the rock. Fishing from canoes off the point was dangerous, so ancient Hawaiians drilled mooring holes through the lava ledges, passed ropes through them and tied the other ends to their canoes, letting the current carry them out to deep water without sweeping them away. They carved shallow salt pans into the lava, too, and filled them with seawater to make salt for preserving fish. Near the holes stands Kalalea Heiau, a stone-walled fishing shrine to Kuʻula, god of fishing, about 42 by 38 feet, surrounded by sacred standing stones. One offshore stone was believed to turn over when the government changed, and fishermen still leave offerings at the heiau.

Later layers followed. A small lighthouse opened in 1906, an airstrip during the Second World War, a space-tracking station in the 1960s, and wind turbines from 1987; the 14 turbines of the Pakini Nui project, completed in 2007, make up the southernmost wind farm in the country. A track leads east to Papakōlea, one of only four green sand beaches in the world, its colour coming from olivine crystals weathered out of an eroded cinder cone. The South Point Complex is a National Historic Landmark.