After 20 Years This Popular Cave on Kauaʻi is Closed
Makauwahi Cave Reserve, which closed in October 2024, is Hawaiʻi’s largest limestone cave.
A popular attraction—and one of our favorite places on Kauaʻi—closed on Oct. 31, 2024.
Makauwahi Cave Reserve, the largest limestone cave in Hawaiʻi and has preserved over 10,000 years of sedimentary history, is no longer accessible to the public. After 20 years the leaseholders of the cave returned the property back to the landowner, Grove Farm Co., which is owned by AOL co-founder and Hawaiʻi native Stephen Case.
David Burney and Lida Pigott Burney founded the reserve in 2004, as the culmination of a large research project they began there in 1992 with colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution and the late Dr. Pila Kikuchi of Kauaʻi Community College.
About 80,000 people visited the cave every year, marveling at the natural beauty and wonder of the place.
The reason for the closure? Money.
According to a statement posted on the cave reserve’s website, it managed to stay open through fundraising, donations and grants. But “it takes more than that to pay our staff to provide tours for 200 or more people per day, while maintaining the restrooms, native plant nursery and over 10,000 native and Polynesian plants translocated to abandoned quarry and farmland around the cave,” wrote Lida Burney, the reserve manager. “All the money is spent now, and as people in our mid-70s, we can’t afford to dip into our personal savings to keep it going while Grove Farm decides what to do with the place.”
The entrance to the Makauwahi Cave.
Photo: David Croxford
Makauwahi Cave began forming over 400,000 years ago; it started as a sand dune and eventually turned to limestone. About 7,000 years ago the cave ceiling collapsed, creating a kind of natural amphitheater. Surrounding it are native plants, including kupukupu, pōhinahina and towering loulu palms, that the Burneys reintroduced. (The couple also opened a tortoise sanctuary on the site, which has also been closed.)
The cave was also home to thousands of endemic species, including the now-extinct turtle-jawed moa nalo, a large flightless goose. Diatoms (a type of phytoplankton), fish bones and canoe fragments have also been excavated at what is considered the richest fossil site in Hawai‘i. Some of Hawai‘i’s rarest creatures still inhabit the cave, including an eyeless cave spider.
HAWAIʻI Magazine staffer Grace Maeda inside the Makauwahi Cave.
Photo: Catherine Toth Fox
Our team has loved exploring the cave and the surrounding area, accessing it via the Māhā‘ulepū Heritage Trail (which is still open). We’re sad to see it closed.
“It’s sad for Lida and me to give up after 33 years of working here,” wrote David Burney, “but it’s time, we feel, to shove this canoe offshore and see who paddles.”
