Entering the lush paradise that is Mānoa Valley is always, quite literally, like taking a breath of fresh air. Perhaps the sensation comes from the way the urbanity sheds itself before you in favor of charming yesteryear homes and so much green. Or how the light dusting of mist may find occasion to settle suddenly upon your nose. Or maybe it’s the rainbows, those brilliant, proud beauties of legend, which laze and lounge over the valley at all seasons of the year, even they being loathe to leave.

The Mānoa Heritage Center, located in Mānoa Valley, is a love letter to this verdant place. The 3.5-acre property is located on Mānoa Road, one of the enclave’s most major of arteries, but you could pass up and down it dozens of times and still not have any idea of the center’s existence. It is perhaps one of the city’s best kept secrets, a privately founded educational space that celebrates all the rich cultural and environmental legacies that the area has hidden in its history. The center has many functions: It’s home to a fully intact and preserved heiau (Hawaiian place of worship) and a garden of native plant species brought to Hawai‘i by the islands’ first settlers, and a space designed to serve cultural practitioners. It’s a place where children can study indigenous technologies (such as ancient heiau-building methods used by the earliest Hawaiians), and learn about the many chapters of the history of Hawai‘i, all of which have shaped its current state.

The journey to create Mānoa Heritage Center as it is today started over a century ago, one could say, when Sam Cooke’s relatives arrived as missionaries in 1837 and started the royal school for the children of the royal families. (Among the students who boarded at the school were Kamehameha II, Kamehameha III, and Bernice Pauahi Bishop.) Cooke’s ancestors built the house that was to become the Mānoa Heritage Center in 1911. In 1996, the late Sam Cooke and his wife, Mary Cooke, both passionate archivists and collectors, bought the property from a developer and relatives it had been split among. Then they founded the center as a final joint expression of their care for preserving the treasures of Hawai‘i and sharing those treasures with others. “This is his and my dream come true,” Mary says.

For Mary, the project is very personal; it’s situated right in her backyard. The couple spent years working with experts and the community to preserve Kūka‘ō‘ō, the ancient agricultural heiau, on the grounds, a place where the farmers of old Mānoa used to come to pray for good crops. They reshaped the garden, ridding it of invasive plants and scouring the islands for native and endangered flora to establish there instead. In early 2018, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Visitor Hale was completed, a reception and education space for the many school children that visit each year. Today, the space hosts cultural workshops that range from hula dancing to gourd decorating.

One of the greatest treasures the Cookes will share with the world is their house itself, where Mary still resides. Known as Kūali‘i, the beautiful, Tudor-style home teeters majestically on the edge of a hill. Walk through its halls, though, and you’ll see that it frames so much more than gorgeous vistas of the Mānoa ridgeline. A museum in its own right, Kūali‘i is filled with historic texts and visual art of Hawai‘i which the Cookes spent a lifetime amassing: serene oil landscapes of Kaua‘i taro fields by D. Howard Hitchcock; pink-kissed railways at sunset from a plantation era of yore by Peter Hurd; vintage drawings, now colorized, of an unrecognizable downtown Honolulu by Paul Emmert. “It’s a great history of Hawai‘i through the eyes of the artists that came to Hawai‘i, starting with Captain Cook’s artist,” Mary says.

To Mary, the center’s primary purpose is to inspire visitors to respect the traditions and histories that exist in the islands. “Hawaiian history and heritage needs to be understood by many more people,” she explains. “And anyone who comes to visit, we want them to carry on their cultural heritage.”