Āhualoa is an unincorporated rural area along the Hamakua Coast on the Island of Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi County, Hawaii, United States.
The name is believed to mean either "long mound" or "long cloud", in the Hawaiian language. The latter is easily understood from the extremely high rainfall and cloud cover that is typical of the area.
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Ahualoa is located at 20°03' North, 155°28' West (20.06, -155.48).[1]
The Old Mamalahoa Highway is the principal road running through Ahualoa. The land is zoned agricultural. A typical lot is 5 acres (2.0 ha) in size. Land use is for residence and small-scale agriculture, including farming, orchards and livestock.
There is no record of Native Hawaiian settlement in the area that is now Āhualoa. It is likely that the Native Hawaiians visited the area for extraction of resources from the ʻōhiʻa lehua-hāpuʻu native forest, but did not live there, as wet forest was not considered a desirable place to live.
The land of Āhualoa differs from many other parts of Hawaii in that it was never used for either cattle ranching or sugarcane plantations. Instead, in the late 19th and early 20th century it was allocated to families of sugarcane workers as farm homesteads, and remains largely so today. The families, primarily Japanese and Portuguese in ethnicity, were the first inhabitants of the area, and many of the present residents are descended from those families. The original native forest was cleared and replaced by a patchwork of pasture, farms and windbreaks.
In the 1970s, many countercultural families from Oʻahu and the mainland US moved to the Āhualoa area. They brought values and ideals of the back-to-the-land movement. A book of material gathered in 2003, Once Upon Ahualoa, explores the experience of this generation with memories and photographs.
Although the main road through Āhualoa has services (electricity, water, telephone), many residents living on side roads use rainwater tanks as a supply of water.