Island Sands 505

Māʻalaea is a census-designated place (CDP) in Maui County, Hawaii, United States. The population was 310 at the 2020 census. Māʻalaea sits on the southern coast of the isthmus separating West Maui from the island’s Central Valley. Like other ahupua‘a, it widens as it descends from mountain slopes into the sea, occupying 5.4 square miles of land and 2.3 miles of ocean. For more than a millennium, Māʻalaea has been a crossroads, a landing place for Hawaiian kings and armies, and in time, whalers and sailing ships. Highways follow the ancient trails that once branched north to Wailuku, west to Lahaina, and south to what are now the towns of Kīhei and Wailea. The name Māʻalaea comes from the Hawaiian word ‘alae, the iron oxide from volcanic eruptions that gives the region its iron-rich red earth.