In 2024, bulldozers were circling a 600-year-old Hawaiian fishpond. Then Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan stepped in with a $4 million cheque to conserve it

For six centuries, a stone wall stretching more than half a mile across a quiet bay in Kauaʻi has done the same job, over and over. It has held back the sea just enough to trap fish, feed families, and outlast empires, plantations, and hurricanes. Two years ago, it nearly lost to a "for sale" sign.

That story now has an ending nobody in Niumalu expected, one involving a $4 million check from Silicon Valley.

A Legend Made of Stone

Locals call it Alakoko. Others know it as the Menehune Fishpond, named for the mythical builders Hawaiian legend credits with raising its walls in a single night. Nobody actually believes elves built a 2,700-foot rock wall by moonlight, but the myth has stuck around because it captures something true: the sheer improbability of the thing. This is the largest surviving fishpond on the island, a 102-acre feat of ancient engineering tucked beside the Hulēʻia refuge near Līhuʻe.


It's also, in plain terms, an ancient food factory. Long before refrigeration or supermarkets, this walled-off lagoon let Native Hawaiians farm fish and seaweed with astonishing efficiency, a closed-loop system biologists today might call sustainable and locals just called smart. Historians recognized as much decades ago. The site landed on the National Register of Historic Places back in 1973, and by 2009 preservationists were sounding alarms, naming it one of Hawaiʻi's most endangered historic places.

Neglect, not vandals, was the real threat. Invasive mangroves had crept in over the decades, choking native plants and clogging the water that native birds and fish depend on. Slowly, an engineering marvel was disappearing under weeds.

Then Came the For-Sale Sign

Everything changed in January 2021, when the land came up for sale on the open market. Suddenly a place with six hundred years of continuous cultural meaning had a price tag, and no guaranteed buyer who cared about its history.

The community didn't sit quietly. More than 5,500 people signed on to a public statement demanding protection. Testimony poured in from residents, cultural practitioners, and local organizations. By February, Kauaʻi's Open Space Commission had thrown its unanimous support behind saving the site. None of that, unfortunately, came with a checkbook attached. Government funding takes time nobody had.

That's where two organizations already working the problem, the Trust for Public Land and the nonprofit Mālama Hulē'ia, went looking elsewhere for money, and fast.

A Facebook Fortune Finds a Fishpond

Enter Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. Through their Chan Zuckerberg Kauaʻi Community Fund, the couple committed the full $4 million needed to close the deal, covering not just the purchase price but transaction costs too. It was enough to move the sale through before the property could slip onto a developer's ledger.

Here's the part that tends to surprise people: Chan and Zuckerberg don't own an inch of it. The Trust for Public Land completed the purchase on November 17, 2021, then immediately handed the land over to Mālama Hulē'ia, the community group that had already spent four years restoring the site by hand before the sale ever went through. The deed now locks the land into conservation, education, and community use permanently. No loophole, no future sale to the highest bidder.

Saving the wall was step one. Reviving it is the real project.

Mālama Hulē'ia's ambitions go well beyond keeping mangroves in check. The nonprofit wants to turn Alakoko back into a working fishpond, one that actually produces food again, the way it did for hundreds of years before the twentieth century got in the way. Alongside that, they're building out plans for the site to double as an open-air classroom, where students can wade into Hawaiian aquaculture, ecology, and history firsthand rather than reading about it in a textbook.

It won't happen fast. Everyone involved describes this as generational work, the kind of restoration measured in decades, not fiscal quarters. But for a wall that has already stood for six hundred years, patience seems like the right pace.