Elevation: 80 feet

Current Real Estate Stats

North beyond Kaanapali and the shopping centers of Napili and Kahana, the road climbs and the vista opens up to fields of silver-green pineapple and manicured golf fairways. Turn down the lane lined with Pacific pines, toward the sea, and you are in Kapalua.

These windswept western foothills of Puu Kukui, the second wettest summit on earth, roll down to the sea in a 1,500 acre patchwork of green slopes that end at five bays which were once frequented by royalty. Across the channel, the island of Molokai looms. Weather in the channel can get rugged with gusty winds and April showers.

Two world-class hotels, the Kapalua Bay Hotel and Villas and the Ritz-Carlton, share this setting with three popular golf courses, ample tennis courts, historic features, a collection of swanky condos and homes and wide open spaces that include a rain forest preserve. There is an art school as well as innovative environmental programs and noteworthy annual events including a food-and-wine symposium, a music festival and a writer's conference.

A pineapple plantation owned by Maui Land and Pineapple Company, Kapalua still has an old general store and vintage Victorian church, the last vestiges of the plantation worker camps where the pineapple field workers lived along the shoreline and a little farther inland. The 23,000-acre pineapple plantation still operates and the master-planned resort developed by the late Colin Cameron in the 1970s takes up less than 1,000 acres of the plantation.