Honolulu holds the only royal palace in the United States, a museum built around six garden courtyards, and a theatre scene writing in Pidgin. This three-day route follows the art, architecture and living Hawaiian culture behind the resort strip.
Hawai'i's largest art museum, opened in 1927, wraps 30 galleries around six open-air garden courtyards. The Asian holdings run to some 20,000 works, including James Michener's donation of 5,400 Japanese woodblock prints. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
Set in the 1928 Spanish Mission Revival former armed services YMCA on Hotel Street, HiSAM shows work bought under the state's 1967 Art in Public Places law — the first percent-for-art programme in the United States. Entry is free.
The only royal palace on American soil, completed in 1882 for King Kalākaua and wired for electric light before the White House was. The basement gallery holds crown regalia; upstairs is the room where Queen Lili'uokalani was imprisoned in 1895.
Around 100 large-format murals cover the warehouse walls between Cooke, Auahi and Coral Streets, repainted each February since the POW! WOW! Hawai'i festival started here in 2011. Low evening light off the single-storey blocks reads the colours best.
Doris Duke's 1937 seaside house on Black Point holds 2,500 objects of Islamic art — Iranian tilework, a carved Damascus room, Mughal marble screens — kept as she arranged them. Access is only by shuttle tour leaving the Honolulu Museum of Art.
The 1922 'Pride of the Pacific' on Bethel Street escaped demolition in 1984 and reopened after a $30 million restoration. Beaux-Arts plasterwork, a Robert Morton pipe organ and Lionel Walden's mural above the proscenium all survive.
Three of the oldest houses in Hawai'i: a New England timber frame shipped round Cape Horn in 1820, an 1831 coral-block depository, and the printing office where the Hawaiian language was first set in movable type. Tours run hourly.
A 100-seat house inside the 1871 Kamehameha V Post Office staging only plays written by Hawai'i residents and set in the islands, a good share of them in Pidgin. Four productions a season, Thursday through Sunday.
Fifteen blocks of 1900s brick rebuilt after the plague fire, holding the lei stands of Maunakea Street, the Izumo Taishakyo Mission founded in 1906 and the incense-thick Kuan Yin Temple on Vineyard Boulevard, still in daily use.
Part bookshop, part cultural centre at Ward Centre: the widest stock of Hawaiian-language and Hawaiiana titles in the state, alongside kapa cloth and feather work, plus free evening classes in 'ukulele, lei making and hula.
A 1911 Tudor Revival house above Mānoa Valley built around Kūka'ō'ō, the last intact agricultural heiau on the Honolulu plain, surrounded by a garden of endemic and Polynesian-introduced plants. Visits by timed reservation only.
Free hula danced by local hālau on the seaside mound beside the Duke Kahanamoku statue, opened with a conch blast and torch lighting as the sun drops. Performances Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, weather permitting.