Drive up Nuʻuanu Avenue past the Oahu Cemetery and you will pass a low stone wall, a gate, and a small Gothic chapel sitting in a grove of old trees. Most people drive right by. That quiet corner, roughly 3 acres (1.2 ha), is Mauna ʻAla, the Royal Mausoleum of Hawaiʻi, and it holds almost every king and queen who ever ruled the Hawaiian Kingdom. Both ruling dynasties, the Kamehameha line and the Kalākaua line, rest here with their families and closest advisors. It is one of the most sacred places on Oʻahu, it is still a working burial ground for the aliʻi, and it is open to the public on weekdays for free. We think every kamaʻāina and every visitor who cares about Hawaiʻi should spend an hour here at least once, and we want you to walk in knowing the story.
Related: ʻIolani Palace: The 1893 Overthrow That Ended the Hawaiian Kingdom, Washington Place: Queen Liliʻuokalani’s Home for 55 Years, and Queen Emma Summer Palace: The Real Story of Hānaiakamalama.
Pohukaina: Where the Aliʻi Rested Before Nuʻuanu
To understand why Mauna ʻAla exists, you have to start downtown on the grounds of ʻIolani Palace. Before the 1800s, the bones of the highest chiefs were hidden. The iwi (bones) of an aliʻi carried mana, and the people entrusted with them, like the chief Hoʻolulu who helped conceal the remains of Kamehameha I in 1819, took the location to their graves. Nobody knows where Kamehameha the Great lies to this day, and that is exactly how his people intended it.
That changed with Western contact and with Kamehameha II, Liholiho. He traveled to London in 1824, saw the royal tombs at Westminster Abbey, and then died there of measles along with his queen, Kamāmalu. When their bodies came home in 1825, the kingdom built its first Western-style royal tomb near the present palace: a small coral-block house with a thatched roof, no windows, and a koa door locked with iron. Two chiefs guarded it day and night. The spot was called Pohukaina, and over the next four decades it filled up with kings, queens, and high chiefs. Other retainers and chiefs ended up in unmarked graves nearby when the vault ran out of room.
Pohukaina is still there. Walk the ʻIolani Palace grounds today and you will see a grassy mound with a marker on the grounds. Chiefs like Kalaniʻōpuʻu and the chiefess Kapiʻolani were never moved, so you are standing beside a burial ground even now. Treat it that way.
A King’s Grief Builds a Mausoleum (1862 to 1865)
The story of the new mausoleum is really the story of one family’s heartbreak. Kamehameha IV, Alexander Liholiho, and Queen Emma had one child, Prince Albert Edward Kauikeaouli Kaleiopapa a Kamehameha, born May 20, 1858. The Hawaiian people called him Ka Haku o Hawaiʻi, the Lord of Hawaiʻi, and his birthdays were national holidays. He was the last child ever born to a reigning Hawaiian monarch. In August 1862 he fell suddenly ill, and on August 27, 1862, he died at the palace at four years old.
Pohukaina was already full. The little prince was placed in a temporary tomb in front of the palace under a tamarind tree, and before the coffin closed, the king took the diamond star off his own uniform and laid it on his son’s chest. Emma rarely left the grave. The king blamed himself, sank into depression, and talked about abdicating. On November 30, 1863, fifteen months after his son, Kamehameha IV died too. He was 29.
Now the kingdom had a king with no place to bury him. His brother, Lot Kapuāiwa, who became Kamehameha V, pushed construction of a new royal mausoleum in Nuʻuanu Valley on a site that Alexander Liholiho and Emma had chosen themselves. The architect was Theodore Heuck, a German who had arrived in Honolulu in 1850 and is usually described as the city’s first professional architect. He designed a Gothic Revival building of coral block laid out in the shape of a Latin cross. Bishop Thomas Nettleship Staley, the first Anglican bishop of Honolulu, oversaw the work. The ʻEwa wing was finished at the end of January 1864, and the king’s funeral, delayed more than two months while crews raced to build it, finally took place on February 3, 1864, with a procession from ʻIolani Palace up Nuʻuanu Avenue. That evening, bearers brought the small casket of Prince Albert and laid him beside his father. Emma was so overcome that she camped on the grounds and slept inside the mausoleum.
The rest of the building was completed in 1865. Robert Crichton Wyllie, the Scottish-born minister of foreign affairs who had served the Kamehameha kings for two decades, died that October and was buried at Mauna ʻAla with a state funeral on October 29, 1865. His was the first burial after the building was finished, and he is one of the very few non-aliʻi ever allowed to rest there.
The Torchlight Night of October 30, 1865
The next night, the kingdom moved its dead. On October 30, 1865, the coffins of the kings and chiefs were taken out of Pohukaina and carried through the streets of Honolulu to Nuʻuanu by torchlight, after dark, in keeping with the Hawaiian custom that the remains of an aliʻi travel at night. Thousands of people walked alongside, and kukui torches lit the whole route. Fourteen years later, at the laying of the cornerstone for the new ʻIolani Palace in 1879, foreign minister John Mākini Kapena still called it a night the world had never seen the like of, with the coffins on their biers thrown into relief by the midnight dark.
How many coffins made the trip depends on who is counting. Some accounts say eighteen coffins. Others count twenty-one aliʻi. Either way, it was the largest movement of royal remains in Hawaiian history, and it gave the valley site its lasting name. Mauna ʻAla means “fragrant hills.” In 1866 the remains of John Young, the British sailor who became one of Kamehameha I’s most trusted advisors and Queen Emma’s grandfather, were moved here as well. His grave sits on the grounds with its own small monument.
Who Rests at Mauna ʻAla, and Who Does Not
Almost every monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom lies here. Kamehameha II, III, IV, and V. Kalākaua and his queen, Kapiʻolani. Liliʻuokalani. Queen Emma and the prince. Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last direct descendant of Kamehameha I, and her husband Charles Reed Bishop. Princess Victoria Kaʻiulani. Princess Likelike. Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole. The exact count by tomb, according to the cemetery historians who have studied it, runs to roughly 24 sets of remains in the Kamehameha tomb and 20 in the Kalākaua crypt, plus the smaller Wyllie tomb and the John Young grave.
Two kings are missing, and both absences tell you something. Kamehameha I was never here, because his bones were hidden in 1819 in the old way and never found. Lunalilo, the sixth king, who reigned barely a year before dying of tuberculosis in 1874, asked to be buried with the people rather than with the chiefs. His tomb stands in the churchyard of Kawaiahaʻo Church downtown, and we cover it in our post on the church. The queen mother Keōpūolani and Princess Nāhiʻenaʻena rest on Maui at Waiola Church in Lahaina.
From One Building to Three Tombs (1887 to 1910)
The Heuck building was never going to hold two dynasties forever. By the 1880s it was crowded, so Charles Reed Bishop paid for an underground vault on the grounds for the Kamehameha family. The caskets were moved into the new Kamehameha Tomb on November 9, 1887, and when Bishop himself died in 1915 his ashes went in and the tomb was sealed. A second underground vault, now called the Wyllie Tomb, was built by the Territory of Hawaiʻi in 1904 for Wyllie and the relatives of Queen Emma.
The Kalākaua family got its own crypt last. In 1907 the territorial legislature set aside $20,000 for it, and the former queen, Liliʻuokalani, along with her nephew Prince Kūhiō, was consulted on the design. On the night of June 24, 1910, the caskets of the Kalākaua dynasty were carried from the mausoleum building down into the new crypt by torchlight, in another nighttime ceremony, with Liliʻuokalani herself supervising. She was 71, the kingdom she had ruled was 17 years gone, and she still made sure her brother and her family were moved the Hawaiian way. Seven years later she would join them.
With the last remains out of the original building, it became a chapel in 1922, a conversion Liliʻuokalani had wanted so the space could be used to honor the aliʻi on their birthdays. The widow of Prince Kūhiō, Elizabeth Kahanu Kalanianaʻole, helped make it happen. The koa interior you see today dates from a 1950 remodel, and the building was restored again in 1987. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on August 7, 1972.
Two Funerals That Stopped the City
To understand what this place meant to the Hawaiian people, look at the two biggest processions that ended at its gate.
King Kalākaua died in San Francisco on January 20, 1891, during a trip to the mainland. Honolulu did not know. The USS Charleston sailed into the harbor on January 29 draped in black with its flags at half mast, and the crowd that had gathered to welcome their king home learned in that moment that he was dead. He lay in state in the throne room for two weeks while Hawaiian choirs sang newly composed mele for him late into every night. The funeral on February 15, 1891, was held entirely in Hawaiian, and the procession up Nuʻuanu Avenue to Mauna ʻAla was so long that newspapers reported it took 75 minutes to pass a single point. Church bells rang across the city and bonfires burned on Punchbowl.
Liliʻuokalani died at Washington Place on November 11, 1917, at 79. The territorial government gave her a state funeral, and on November 18 her catafalque was pulled from ʻIolani Palace up Nuʻuanu Avenue by 204 stevedores hauling ropes 1,200 feet (370 m) long. As it moved, the composer Charles E. King led a youth choir in “Aloha ʻOe,” her own song, and the crowds along the route picked it up and sang it with them. For a week her casket rested on a bier in the Kalākaua crypt while her ladies-in-waiting kept vigil. On November 26, 1917, it was sealed into the niche beside her husband, John Owen Dominis. The queen who had been overthrown by a small group of businessmen in 1893 and imprisoned in her own palace in 1895 was carried to Mauna ʻAla by thousands of her people.
The Flag, the Kahu, and a Place That Is Still Hawaiian
After the United States annexed Hawaiʻi in 1898, Congress passed a joint resolution in 1900 that pulled Mauna ʻAla out of the public lands and set it aside, permanently, as a burial place for the royal family of Hawaiʻi. That is why the Hawaiian flag flies here on its own, without the American flag beside it. Only a handful of places in the islands share that distinction, among them ʻIolani Palace and Thomas Square.
The mausoleum has always had a kahu, a keeper, and for generations the job passed through descendants of Hoʻolulu, the same chief who helped hide Kamehameha I. The Maiʻoho family held it for most of the last 60 years: Lydia Namahanaikaleleokalani Taylor Maiʻoho from 1966 to 1994, her son William “Bill” Kaiheʻekai Maiʻoho from 1995 until his death in 2015, and his son William “Kai” Maiʻoho from 2015 to 2023. The famous hula dancer ʻIolani Luahine was kahu in the early 1960s. In May 2024 the Department of Land and Natural Resources appointed Doni Leināʻala Hanuna Pahukoa Chong as the 18th curator, the first in a long time chosen from outside that family line, which drew real pushback from parts of the Hawaiian community. The state later added a separate cultural protocols position at the site in response. The burials themselves have not stopped. Abigail Kinoiki Kekaulike Kawānanakoa, a descendant of the Kalākaua line who died in December 2022 at 96, was laid to rest in 2023 in a new tomb of her own near the entrance, the first burial here since 1953.
Visiting Mauna ʻAla With Respect
Royal Mausoleum State Monument (Mauna ʻAla), 2261 Nuʻuanu Avenue, Honolulu, HI 96817. The gate is just past the Oahu Cemetery, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) up Nuʻuanu Avenue from downtown. Hawaiʻi State Parks lists the hours as 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, closed on weekends and holidays, and there is no entrance fee. The official page, with the curator’s contact information and current notices, is at dlnr.hawaii.gov. At the time we wrote this, the state had posted that the monument will be closed for repairs on November 27, 2026, so check that page before you drive up.
Plan on 30 to 60 minutes. You can walk the grounds, read the plaques, and view the chapel and the tombs from outside. The Kamehameha and Kalākaua crypts are underground and sealed, so what you see are the stone entrances, the stairs, and the monuments above them. The Wyllie tomb and John Young’s grave are at ground level. If the chapel is open, step in quietly.
Dress and act like you are visiting a family’s grave, because you are. Kūpuna still come here to leave hoʻokupu (offerings), and Hawaiian civic clubs and the Royal Benevolent Societies hold ceremonies on the aliʻi birthdays throughout the year. On those days, which the state lists on its page, access can be limited, and the curator asks that you call ahead. Keep your voice down and keep the keiki close. Stay off the tombs and monuments, and don’t climb on anything! This is not the place for a picnic, and we would leave the dog at home. Photos of the grounds are fine, but ask before photographing anyone who is there to pray or make an offering. If you want to leave something, a lei or a flower is the tradition. Take any plastic back with you.
The state asks that groups larger than 25 get a Special Use Permit in advance, and it recommends that anyone planning a huakaʻi (a group visit) contact the curator first, mostly so visits do not stack up and parking does not become a problem. We have not confirmed how many stalls are on the grounds, so if you are coming with several cars, carpool, and give yourself a few extra minutes to find legal parking rather than counting on it.
Make it a half day if you can. ʻIolani Palace and the Pohukaina mound are a short drive back down the hill, Kawaiahaʻo Church and Lunalilo’s tomb are right next to the palace, and Queen Emma Summer Palace is about a mile (1.6 km) further up the valley on the Pali Highway. Seeing where the aliʻi lived, worshipped, and were laid to rest in a single afternoon changes how you look at downtown Honolulu. The mausoleum is the last stop on that story, and the quietest.
More from Wanderlustyle
Kawaiahaʻo Church: The Coral Church of the Aliʻi (1842)
The Battle of Nuʻuanu: How Kamehameha Took Oʻahu in 1795
Aliʻiōlani Hale: The Palace That Became a Courthouse (1874)
The Annexation of Hawaiʻi and the Road to Statehood (1898 to 1959)
Nuʻuanu Pali Lookout: What to Know Before You Go
