How Kauai Became Hollywood’s “Garden Isle”

When Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park burst onto screens in 1993, audiences were swept away (to the tune of around $914 million) by its dinosaurs, drama — and location.

Jurassic Park looked like it had been shot on the far reaches of another world entirely, but what many of the film ’s scenes were showcasing — as they would across the franchise’s next three installments — was the absolutely stunning splendor that filmmakers have been finding on the Hawaiian island of Kauai since the 1930s.

“There is a sense you get in some movies that you’ve really traveled somewhere, and Jurassic Park has that, largely because of Kauai and the power of its imagery and diversity,” the blockbuster’s production designer Rick Carter would later explain in the Making of Jurassic Park book. “There is