Liliʻuokalani Gardens Bridge

The Liliʻuokalani Gardens Bridge is a small, arched, red-painted wooden footbridge crossing Waihonu Pond inside Liliʻuokalani Park and Gardens in Hilo — a 30-acre Edo-style Japanese garden built on land donated by Queen Liliʻuokalani and dedicated between 1917 and 1919 as a tribute to the Japanese sugar plantation immigrants who helped build the islands. Hawaii has no traditional truss-built covered bridge of the type found across the mainland; this ornamental garden bridge is the closest and best-known equivalent, built using traditional Japanese joinery techniques.

The bridge remains one of the most photographed features of the gardens, its bright red form arching over a koi-filled fishpond framed by stone lanterns, pines, and banyan trees along Hilo Bay. Liliʻuokalani Gardens is recognized as the largest formal Japanese garden outside Japan itself, and the little covered bridge — modest in scale but iconic in image — has become an enduring symbol of the park more than a century after it was first built.