Coco Palms is rotting
In Kaua’i, Coco Palms Resort sits by the highway.
The concrete skeleton of the hotel looms over junk piles and dumped cars. Lizards crawl on rock walls, ducks and turtles swim in a lagoon, and grass swallows pathways that weave through the property. This forgotten exterior masks a rich history, including the royalty of Kaua’i, Elvis, a massive hurricane, and an opulent hotel for tourists. Coco Palms mimics the complexities in Hawai’i that come from the United State’s takeover of the island chain.
Bob Jasper wears blue jeans and hiking boots, appropriate dress for the various hazards that now riddle the property. We have to sign a waiver before entering, and he points out the obstacles (mostly falling coconuts) as we walk through the overgrown paths.
Jasper is the tour guide for Coco Palms and the only person who has been involved with the resort throughout its demise.
Jasper said he “always was a show-off,” since he was a kid, and founded a movie tour company to show tourists the filming locations of Kaua’i’s rich cinema history. One of the stops on his tour was Coco Palms — a filming location for 1961 Blue Hawaii, starring Elvis. When he started, he told us the resort was in pretty good condition, for being deserted.
Jasper said most of the damage didn’t come from the 1992 hurricane that kicked off the abandonment. The state of the resort is largely due to a fire on July 4th, 2014. Jasper suspects arsonists, mentioning a Facebook post saying the resort should be burned down that was posted just a day before the fire.
Today, firefighters actually train in some of the empty structures. We watched water leftover from their exercises drip into one of five restaurants, forming muddy pools. When the hotel still had rooms, the police department used the buildings here for hostage scenarios.
As we walked through the buildings, Jasper pointed out murals by renowned artists, bathrooms formerly fitted with giant shells as sinks, toppled pillars made to look like coconut tree trunks, a pool tiled with a Hawaiian flag and the words to a song. He said the hotel rooms had furniture made of native Koa wood, beautiful and priceless. When one company took ownership, he said the first thing they did was strip the rooms of the Koa furniture and ship it overseas, replacing it with cheap hotel beds and tables.
Many of the tourists he showed around prior to the Covid pandemic stayed at Coco Palms while it was operational, or remember their parents telling stories about the hotel. Elvis impersonators and fans attended as well, fascinated by the place he took Priscilla on honeymoon and recorded part of his most famous film.
The abandoned nature of the resort today attracts its own following. Some enjoy the tours just for curiosity's sake. One of the scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was filmed at Coco Palms, one of the many film credits the site holds. The backdrop this time, however, was primitive, an enemy camp in the overgrown coconut grove.
The far side of the resort is lined with a large lagoon, made with the black lava rock typical of historic and contemporary structures. During the resort's reign, hotel guests sought out the rooms overlooking this lagoon. Here, too, are the foundations for bungalows, and we watch as people shuck coconuts gathered from the grove.
Jasper tells us that within the past couple of years, the company began granting use of the grove to the public. The site has taken up new uses by locals — some, including native Hawaiians who say they have the legal right to the land due to ancestry, have intermittently occupied the land. Because Hawai’i was claimed by the United States and what were public lands were auctioned off to settlers, land claims are often in shakey waters in terms of legality. This includes Coco Palms — Since the mid-1850s, it has been subject to various legal disputes. In 2018, a judge ruled that two Hawaiians occupying the site must leave, and hundreds of protestors gathered there. These protests contributed to the delay in a revitalization effort.
The lagoon, for example, dates back at least to the early 1800s, when some of the Kauaian nobility, or aliʻi, called this site home.
The ancient fish ponds that were rebranded as lagoons are no longer tended, people’s graves were shuffled around when the resort was built, all for a resort that isn’t providing any jobs for locals. Gary Hooser, former state senator for Hawai’i, calls this desecration and argues that the local government should stop allowing foreign investors authority to try and fix things again and again. 29 years of grasping to do something with Coco Palms, he says, is too long.
The only activity on the foreclosed site these days is a road construction crew. The state is widening the adjacent highway, and use a dirt road as a staging area for construction equipment. The heavy machinery almost gives the impression the hotel is being worked on, but no current construction is going on for the resort.
The most recent attempt to revitalize the hotel fell through in 2019 when owners defaulted on an $11.2 million dollar loan.
The buildings may no longer even be salvageable at this point. In 2020, the project's architect Ron Agor warned the structures had to be fixed in the coming 6 months. The rebar, metal frames that keep concrete together, had become exposed to rust in critical columns. This time period has come and passed, meaning the concrete frames likely are not structurally sound.
The site as a backdrop for Blue Hawaii introduced Americans to the islands as a tourist destination. Traditions that were made up for the resort were peddled as ‘native’ Hawaiian culture in the film. For example, the “traditional Hawaiian wedding” portrayed in Blue Hawaii was invented by Grace Busher, the longtime hotel manager and creative force of the resort. The garb worn by the attendees of the wedding was copied from performers' outfits at Coco Palms, said Jasper.
Walking through the site, he pointed out many details Busher invented, including the ‘tiki torch ceremony’, where guests are called to dinner by the lighting of torches. In the film, Elvis tells viewers this is a native Hawaiian tradition.
Before we parted ways, Jasper said that many Hawaiians believe that Blue Hawaii devastated the island chain, because it introduced waves of tourism that furthered the globalization of Hawaiian culture. It’s hard to measure just how impactful Hollywood’s depiction of Hawai’i has been, but it was intimately tied to Coco Palms resort. The commodification of culture is an essential part of globalization. The United States swallowed up the land of Hawai’i and spat back out hula girls and resort destinations for Americans to consume.
“Some people want to see it a park, or a cultural center, or maybe elderly housing,” Jasper said. But others, including many followers of his Coco Palms Facebook group, want to see it returned to its former glory.
