Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau occupies a lava shoreline in Kona within a Native Hawaiian cultural landscape of fisheries, farms, settlements, trails, temples, and chiefly residences. Before the nineteenth-century abolition of the kapu system, a puʻuhonua offered a sanctioned place of refuge. People who violated certain sacred restrictions, noncombatants during war, or defeated warriors could seek protection there and, after appropriate rites, return to society. The institution operated through religious and chiefly authority; it was not simply an unrestricted sanctuary in the modern legal sense.

Beside the refuge lay Royal Grounds used by high-ranking aliʻi for residence, ceremony, recreation, and governance. The massive dry-laid Great Wall separated important spaces and demonstrated skilled stone construction. The sacred complex included Hale o Keawe, a thatched temple-mausoleum built around the beginning of the eighteenth century to hold the remains of deified chiefs. Their mana reinforced the refuge's sanctity. Carved wooden kiʻi marked ceremonial areas, while fishponds, house sites, sled courses, canoe landings, and stone features reveal a working community sustained by reciprocal relationships among land, sea, gods, and people.

Political consolidation under Kamehameha I and intensified foreign contact transformed Hawaiʻi. In 1819 Hawaiian leaders ended the kapu system, and Christian conversion soon changed religious practice. Hale o Keawe was dismantled in 1829 and chiefly remains were moved; many images and structures disappeared or deteriorated. Ranching, settlement, collecting, tsunamis, and shoreline weathering altered the site. Yet Native Hawaiian families retained genealogical, spiritual, and community relationships to Hōnaunau, and the loss of buildings did not make the landscape culturally empty. Early preservation efforts sometimes misunderstood or rearranged surviving features.

Federal protection began as City of Refuge National Historical Park in 1961, with the Hawaiian name adopted in 1978. Archaeological work in the 1960s documented the Hale o Keawe platform after earlier repairs and tsunami damage. The National Park Service restored the platform and reconstructed a thatched hale, palisade, and kiʻi using research and consultation. Those above-ground elements are modern reconstructions maintained through traditional knowledge and replacement of perishable wood and thatch; the platform, wall cores, archaeological deposits, and landscape contain older fabric. This distinction strengthens rather than diminishes their educational and ceremonial significance.

The National Park Service manages the park while Native Hawaiian practitioners and descendants contribute knowledge, protocols, craft, and continuing cultural care. Admission is charged under current rules, and visitors follow restrictions protecting sacred structures, shoreline resources, and archaeological features. Demonstrations, trails, and interpretive exhibits can introduce traditional technologies, but the site is not an outdoor stage set. Its meaning depends on a living Hawaiian framework in which refuge, chiefly genealogy, architecture, ocean, subsistence, and spirituality remain connected. Respectful interpretation identifies what survives, what was restored, and what was consciously rebuilt after historical disruption.