Welcome to Our City!!

You could search the whole world over and never find another island like Oahu. It's an island of magnificent panoramas, ringed with white sand beaches, capped by towering volcanic peaks, and in between the mountains and the ocean lies the playground of the Pacific. Described by Mark Twain as "the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean," Hawai'i is a string of 137 islands encompassing a land area of 6,422.6 square miles in the north central Pacific Ocean about 2,400 miles from the west coast of the continental United States. No one knows for certain when Honolulu was founded. Hawaiian oral histories and modern archeology indicate a settlement in Honolulu about 1100 A.D., but it may have been settled earlier as the first Polynesian migrants arrived nearly 2,000 years ago. Shortly after the conquest of Oahu, the high chief of Kauai surrendered sovereignty to King Kamehameha I and all the islands were united as one government. During the monarchy, local affairs were administered through the Privy Council, the Minister of the Interior and the governors appointed by the king for each island. Even for a period after U.S. annexation of the islands in 1898 and the creation of the Territory of Hawaii by the Congress in 1900, there was no municipal government.