HONOLULU (KHON2) — Tours of Kalaupapa will reopen in late September 2025 after a five-year pandemic closure.
The historic settlement on Molokai still has living patients, tucked along Molokai’s rugged cliffs.
Kalaupapa is a testament to survival as it was once a forced quarantine for those with Hansen’s Disease — or Leprosy — it isolated thousands for over a century.
UH history professors recall how King Kamehameha V’s proclamation turned the area into a place of exile.
“In 1865, where he sets this proclamation, an Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy, which sets up the peninsula on Molokai was actually called the Makanalua Penninsula as this kind of, quarantine/penal colony, for people who had, Leprosy, or what we call Hansen’s Disease now,” said Noah Hanohano Dolim, UH Manoa History Department associate professor.
The Department of Health’s Hansen’s Disease manager told KHON2 that 8,000 people are estimated to have died in Kalaupapa, and just six patient-residents remain. Three of them live full-time in the area and the other three split time on Oahu, and the manager said the return of tours is a careful step to share their legacy.
“The bus operators have been trained about the story and the challenges and the hardships that the patients have went through,” said Baron Chan, DOH Hansen’s Disease manager. “So they get a taste of that. But they also drive to what we call Kalawao, or the backside, which is where Father Damien’s first church was.”
Tours were halted in 2020 to protect the patient residents from exposure during the COVID pandemic, historians said it also put a pause on hearing invaluable stories from residents of the isolated community.
“And it’s a really, really, heavy history, that I think people don’t fully grasp, because so much of that history was kind of cast aside,” Dolim said
The founder of the company who will manage the tours is a patient-resident themself and said in a statement:
“I wanted to create something that not only shares the history, but also honors the people who lived it. This is my home, my story, and my gift to future generations,” said Meli Watanuki via the National Parks Service.
For more information or to book a tour, visit Seawind Tours or call (808) 949-4144.