Pūowaina sits right on top of downtown Honolulu, close enough that you can pick out the office tower your cousin works in from the rim. Turn around and there is Diamond Head. Turn the other way and the reef runway is shimmering out past the airport like a mirage.
Down inside the crater, laid out under monkeypod trees and plumeria, are more than 60,000 graves.
Most people call it Punchbowl. The full name is the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. It is one of the few places on Oʻahu where a rental Jeep, a tour bus, and somebody’s tūtū visiting her husband share a parking row.
Entry is free, the gates open every single day, and nobody is going to ask you for a reservation. That makes Punchbowl one of the easiest stops to add to a Honolulu morning.
It is also one of the easiest to get slightly wrong, usually by showing up at 5:45 p.m. in new slippers with no water.
So let’s get you there right.
Related: Pearl Harbor National Memorial visitor guide | Puʻuloa: the Hawaiian history behind Pearl Harbor | ʻIolani Palace visitor guide
Quick reference links for your visit
Bookmark these before you drive up. Nobody wants to be squinting at a government website in the sun with a toddler melting down in the back seat. The official cemetery page from the National Cemetery Administration carries closure notices and burial information. The American Battle Monuments Commission page for the Honolulu Memorial covers the memorial itself.
Looking for one specific grave? The VA Gravesite Locator hands you a section and site number before you leave the hotel. That beats wandering 112 acres (45 hectares) of flat markers hoping to get lucky. For bus times, use TheBus.
📍 National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, 2177 Puowaina Drive, Honolulu, HI 96813
Cemetery office: (808) 532-3720, weekdays 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Where Punchbowl is and how to get there
The crater sits about 7 miles (11 km) from Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, tucked in behind downtown and below the Tantalus ridge. From Waikīkī it is 15 to 25 minutes, and which end of that range you land on depends entirely on whether the H1 is having a good day.
The drive up is half the fun. Puowaina Drive winds through the neighborhoods stacked below the crater, past plumeria trees, chain-link fences, and at least one very confident rooster. The road narrows as it climbs.
Take it slow up here. This is a real neighborhood, the kind where somebody’s uncle is out washing his truck in the driveway. Keiki on bikes will appear out of nowhere right after a blind curve, every single time.
Coming from the H1, you will exit toward the Pali Highway, then work your way onto Puowaina Drive. Your phone will get you there without drama.
Just plug in the street address rather than the cemetery name. A few map apps drop the pin at the lookout instead of the main gate. Then you are doing a three-point turn on a road built for one and a half cars.
Getting there without a car
You can reach Punchbowl on TheBus, though the walk at the end is the part nobody mentions until you are doing it. Route 15 toward Pacific Heights drops you at Puowaina Drive and Hookui Street. From there it is roughly a 1.5 mile (2.4 km) walk uphill to the memorial.
That is a real climb, in real Honolulu sun, with a backpack that felt lighter at the bus stop.
The 15 also runs about once an hour, so a missed bus turns into a long wait on a curb with no shade. Without a car, a rideshare from Waikīkī is usually the kinder call, and it costs less than the aloe vera you would need afterward.
Plenty of visitors see Punchbowl as one stop on a half day Oʻahu tour that includes the cemetery. That solves the transport question and the parking question at once, and somebody else deals with the H1.
Gate hours, and why late afternoon is the risky slot
The National Cemetery Administration runs the gate, and it posts visitation hours of 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., every day of the year.
One thing to know before you plan around that. The American Battle Monuments Commission administers the memorial at the top of the stairs, and it still publishes an older seasonal schedule. That version closes at 5:30 p.m. from September 30 through March 1.
Two agencies, one crater, two posted closing times. Welcome to the federal government.
So treat late afternoon as the slot that needs a phone call. Ring the cemetery office at (808) 532-3720 and ask what time the gate locks that week. It takes a minute and saves you a wasted drive up the hill with everyone in the car asking if you are sure.
Give yourself a buffer either way. Set an alarm on your phone for 30 minutes before closing, especially if you drove up to the lookout. Staff start sweeping the grounds well before the posted hour, and they have heard every excuse.
The administrative office keeps its own schedule, weekdays only, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. It closes on federal holidays, with Memorial Day as the exception.
If you need help finding a specific grave and you want a human rather than a screen, come on a weekday morning. The folks at the desk have helped a lot of families find a lot of names, and they are good at it.
Good news on the construction front. The safety project that had Columbarium Courts 1 through 5 torn up ran from mid 2024 into October 2025, and those courts are open for visits again.
What it costs to visit
Nothing. There is no entry fee, no reservation system, no timed ticket, and no gift shop waiting at the exit to test your willpower.
Parking is free too, along the interior drives inside the grounds. On a normal weekday you will find a spot within a minute or two of the gate, which for Honolulu is basically a miracle.
Do not panic if you have to circle once during a funeral service. Interments happen most weekdays, and a service will temporarily fill the closest rows with folding chairs and family. Just keep rolling to the next drive and give them room.
Free admission is rare for a Honolulu landmark this size. It is one reason Punchbowl sits on our list of free things to do on Oʻahu, right up there with the beach and staring at the ocean.
What you are looking at when you walk in
The first thing that surprises most visitors is how flat and green it all reads. You expect rows of white headstones like in the movies. Instead you get one huge lawn, crater wall to crater wall, with nothing standing up in it but trees and flagpoles.
Every grave is marked with a flat granite plate set level with the grass, so the whole bowl stays visually open. Mature monkeypod and banyan trees throw shade across the drives, and plumeria drops on the lawns all day like the trees are showing off.
The crater itself formed somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 years ago, part of the same late burst of volcanic activity that built Diamond Head and Koko Head. Geologists call it a tuff cone. Everybody else calls it the reason your calves hurt.
Pūowaina translates most commonly as “Hill of Sacrifice,” and the name carries real weight. This was an altar site where offerings were made and where those who broke kapu were put to death, centuries before anyone proposed a cemetery here.
Later, Kamehameha mounted cannon on the rim to salute arriving dignitaries. In the 1930s the Hawaiʻi National Guard used the crater as a rifle range, and anti-aircraft guns positioned here fired back on December 7, 1941.
Congress funded the cemetery in February 1948. The first interment was January 4, 1949, and the grounds were dedicated on September 2 of that same year. More than 13,000 service members who died across the Pacific in World War II were brought here in the years right after the war.
The Honolulu Memorial and the Courts of the Missing
Walk to the far end of the grounds and you reach a wide stone staircase climbing the back wall of the crater. This is the Honolulu Memorial, and it is administered separately, by the American Battle Monuments Commission rather than the VA.
Flanking those stairs are eight Courts of the Missing, and the marble goes on longer than you are ready for.
The slabs carry the names of 18,095 Americans missing from the Pacific in World War II and 8,210 missing from the Korean War. Two half courts were added at the foot of the staircase in 1980, listing 2,504 Americans missing from the Vietnam War.
Read a few of the names out loud, quietly. Each one takes about four seconds, and the place changes a little once you do.
At the top of the stairs stands Lady Columbia, a 30 foot (9 m) figure on the bow of a ship holding a laurel branch. She is meant to represent every grieving mother. The inscription below her comes from Abraham Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Bixby, and it is worth reading twice.
If she looks familiar, you have seen her before in the opening credits of Hawaii Five-0, both the 1968 original and the reboot.
Behind her sits a small chapel, flanked by galleries holding enormous mosaic battle maps in deep ocean blues. The maps walk you through the Pacific and Korean campaigns, island by island.
Two more pavilions were added in 2012, one with an orientation map and one carrying mosaic maps of the Vietnam War.
Give yourself 20 minutes up here minimum. It is shaded, it is quiet, and it is the one part of Punchbowl that people kick themselves for rushing.
The lookout at the top of the crater
Most folks park down near the entrance, walk to the memorial, snap the photo, and roll back down the hill without ever knowing there was a lookout. Keep driving.
The road inside the grounds climbs the inner wall of the crater and dumps you out on the rim with all of Honolulu laid out below you. Diamond Head sits off to your left, the harbor cranes are straight ahead, and the reef runway shimmers out past the airport.
It is also the single best spot to understand the shape of the crater. From the floor you feel like you are in a park. From the rim you realize you are standing inside a volcano with a cemetery in the bottom of it, and the whole thing quietly clicks.
The lookout keeps the same gate hours as the rest of the grounds. Do not linger up there until closing time! Getting locked inside a national cemetery is not the Hawaiʻi story you want to tell at the office, mostly because nobody will believe how it happened.
Chasing golden hour? Punchbowl closes too early for a proper sunset most of the year, so come for the late afternoon light and then move on. Our roundup of the best sunset spots on Oʻahu covers where to be when the sun finally drops.
Graves that visitors come looking for
Punchbowl is the resting place of more than 60,000 people, and a handful of those names draw steady traffic all year.
Ernie Pyle is here, the war correspondent who wrote about infantrymen instead of generals and was killed by machine gun fire on Ie Shima in April 1945. He was one of five people interred on the day the cemetery opened to the public.
Ellison Onizuka is here too. Hawaiʻi’s first astronaut, a Kona boy from Kealakekua on the Big Island, lost aboard Challenger in 1986.
Senator Daniel Inouye was buried at Punchbowl in 2012. He earned the Medal of Honor with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, lost his right arm in Italy, and then represented Hawaiʻi in Congress from statehood until his death. Senator Spark Matsunaga and Congresswoman Patsy Mink, who co authored Title IX, are here as well.
Several other Medal of Honor recipients from the 442nd and the 100th Infantry Battalion rest in these same rows. For a lot of local families, that is the section they walk to first, and they do not need the map.
Hawaiʻi governors John A. Burns and William F. Quinn are buried here. So are tattoo artist Norman “Sailor Jerry” Collins and actor and wrestler Harold Sakata, who played Oddjob in Goldfinger.
Famous Amos founder Wally Amos is here too, along with Stanley Dunham, President Obama’s grandfather. Yes, that Famous Amos. The cookie guy.
Do not wander the rows hoping to stumble onto a name. Look it up first. The VA Gravesite Locator gives you a section letter and a site number, and there are lookup screens near the visitor entrance if you did not check ahead.
The rules that catch visitors off guard
This looks like a park. It is governed like a federal cemetery, because it is one.
Under federal regulation, recreational activity on the grounds is prohibited. That means no jogging, no cycling, no picnicking, no frisbee, and no walking your dog, no matter how well behaved he is. Service animals are the exception.
We get why people are surprised. It is the greenest lawn in Honolulu with a lookout on top, and it looks like somewhere you would take a run. Please do not. Somebody’s grandmother is right there.
Photography is fine when it is done respectfully. Snapshots of the memorial, the view, and a family member’s marker are all normal. Commercial shoots, drones, and anything involving a tripod and a ring light need clearance from the cemetery director first, so call ahead rather than showing up with gear.
Keep your voice down near a service. Funerals are held most weekdays, and you will know one is happening when you see the folding chairs and the honor guard in dress uniform. Give them the whole drive, not just half of it, and wait to take that photo.
Walk between the markers, not across them. And if you bring flowers, take the wrapping with you, because the trades will grab it and park it on somebody’s marker three rows over.
Memorial Day at Punchbowl
Memorial Day is the one day Punchbowl stops being quiet, and it is worth seeing at least once in your life.
On the weekend before, more than a thousand Scouts and volunteers from the Aloha Council fan out across the crater with boxes of flags and armloads of lei. They put an American flag and a fresh lei on every single grave. Every one.
Locals call it the Memorial Day Good Turn. Watching a nine year old carefully drape a plumeria lei over a stranger’s marker will stay with you longer than most of what you do on this trip.
The Mayor’s Memorial Day Ceremony follows on the holiday itself, with oli, a rifle salute, a flyover, taps, the Royal Hawaiian Band, and hula. Bring tissues. The flyover alone gets people.
The cemetery extends its hours for Memorial Day, and parking fills fast. Come early or plan to walk in from the neighborhood below, and wear the comfortable shoes, not the cute ones.
One clarification, because it trips people up every year: the floating lantern ceremony is a separate event at Ala Moana Regional Park, not at Punchbowl. Many families do both, one in the morning and one at sunset, and it makes for a long, good day.
How long to give it, and what to pair it with
Plan on 45 minutes if you are moving with purpose. Ninety minutes is better, and that includes the memorial, the lookout, and time to sit on a bench under a monkeypod and just be there.
The natural pairing is Pearl Harbor. Go there first thing in the morning while the Arizona Memorial tickets are still moving, grab lunch on the way back, then come to Punchbowl in the early afternoon.
That order gives the day a shape. Punchbowl is where many of those service members were finally laid to rest, and the afternoon lands differently once you have stood on the harbor that morning.
Downtown Honolulu is a five minute drive from the gate. ʻIolani Palace, Kawaiahaʻo Church, and the King Kamehameha statue at Aliʻiolani Hale all sit within a few blocks of each other. Chinatown’s lunch counters are a short walk past all three, which handles the most important part of any itinerary.
Going with a guide
A guide is worth considering here, mostly because the story connects across sites. A good driver also handles the parking, the H1, and the guy in the back who keeps asking about Hawaii Five-0. Nearly every Pearl Harbor day tour from Waikīkī rolls through Punchbowl on the way back.
This small group Pearl Harbor tour that stops at Punchbowl keeps the headcount low, which matters at the Arizona Memorial. Families traveling with keiki, or with anyone who tires easily, may prefer a private Pearl Harbor and downtown Honolulu tour. You set your own pace, and you take the nap when the nap is needed.
Either way, confirm that Punchbowl is a stop and not a drive by. Some itineraries only slow down at the entrance and call it a visit.
What to bring
Bring water and a hat, and we mean a real hat, not the free visor from the rental car counter. The lawns are wide open and the crater holds the afternoon heat. It is called Punchbowl for a reason, and by 1:00 p.m. you are the punch.
Wear closed shoes if you plan to walk the sections. Slippers are fine on the paved drives, but the grass is uneven where markers have settled and the ground stays soggy after rain. Your socks will remember.
Sunscreen matters more than people expect, since you are up higher with almost nothing blocking the sun and the granite bounces it right back at you.
Bring a light jacket in winter if you are heading to the lookout in the late afternoon. The trades come over the rim with nothing to slow them down, and it goes from warm to windbreaker in about a minute.
One last thing before you go
Punchbowl draws millions of visitors a year, which puts it near the top of any Hawaiʻi attendance list. It also holds people whose families still come every Sunday with fresh flowers and a folding chair.
Both of those things are true at the same time, and the place works best when visitors remember the second one.
Walk slower than you think you need to. Read a name or two off the marble and say it in your head. Then head up to the rim, let the trades hit your face, and take the same photo everybody takes, because it is a great photo.
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