More than 3.3 million people visited Hawaii’s two major national parks — Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park and the Pearl Harbor National Memorial — in 2023, an approximately 5.5% increase from the previous year.

The parks are two of 400 national parks that reported recreational visitor numbers, with all the reporting parks seeing 325.5 million visitors in 2023, 13 million more visitors than in 2022.

Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park saw 1,620,294 visitors in 2023, an almost 2.5% increase from the year before and a 27.5% increase from 2008, which marked the beginning of a 10-year eruption within Halemaumau Crater at Kilauea’s summit.

“Eruptions often influence visitation at Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, and eruptions have also drastically changed the park,” park Superintendent Rhonda Loh said in a news release.

A construction project to repair and remove damaged buildings following the 2018 Kilauea eruption and summit collapse began at the end of January and is expected to last nearly two years. Buildings damaged in the eruption, including the park’s former Jaggar Museum and buildings operated by the U.S. Geological Survey, like the Okamura Building and the Annex, at Uekahuna, will be removed through the project.

A new USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory field station is being constructed near the historic ball field at Kilauea Military Camp. Additionally, construction of a new administrative lane on Crater Rim Drive and a roundabout west of the entrance is expected to start in mid-March.

Loh said park visitors should be aware of the construction and should plan ahead and expect delays and temporary park closures. Information on construction impacts can be found on a new page on HVNP’s website.

The Pearl Harbor National Memorial welcomed 1,692,719 visitors in 2023, an increase of almost 8.5% from 2022.

“We have definitely bumped back up to what we were pre-COVID,” David Kilton, chief of interpretation at Pearl Harbor National Memorial, said. “We’re looking at (numbers) that were the trend before COVID hit.”

Park Superintendent Tom Leatherman said visitation numbers remain steady throughout the year, with 4,000 to 8,000 people visiting the site daily.

The park completed its last big construction project in January 2023, which involved reconstructing the dock used to load visitors to go over to the Arizona Memorial. During the one-year construction period, the park reduced the number of trips to the Memorial offered each day.

“There were times when it was closed completely because it was broken, so we had to repair it. There were a lot of interruptions and cancellations,” Leatherman said.

Since the completion of the dock project, Pearl Harbor is back in full operations, offering tours every 15 minutes between 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.

“That was a huge project and has been a huge help for us that we now have a very stable and effective resource to allow for those boat operations,” Kilton said. “We’re so grateful to not be in that place anymore.”

The park’s next big project is making some name and rank corrections on its Arizona Memorial wall, which will probably take place later this year or early 2025 at a time of year that the park sees lower visitation numbers, such as October or January. During the construction period, which is expected to last no longer than a month, the shrine room where the wall is located will not be accessible.

The National Park Service, which oversees 429 national parks in its system, has been collecting visitation data since 1979. This past year was the first year that NPS received visitor number reports from national parks in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories. Five national parks reported visitor numbers for the first time in 2023, and it was the first year that a park from Delaware was included in the report.

Data from the National Park Service showed that recent trends in recreation visits indicate a return to “more typical visitation patterns post-pandemic,” according to its website, as patterns become more similar year to year. These figures and trends “guide how the National Park Service manages parks to ensure the best experience possible for park visitors,” according to the HVNP news release.

The NPS Visitation Statistics Dashboard provides more information and can be viewed online.