A Brief History
of the Portuguese in Hawai`i

The Portuguese, who made their first arrivals in Hawai`i in 1878, have had an important impact on the development of Kona. Initially, Portuguese from the Azores and Madeira came here to work the sugar cane plantations, seeking a better life. Always industrious, they soon became landowners and with that came ranching. They were a major factor in the development of a flourishing dairy industry, using their skills as stone masons to create miles of stone cattle pens to hold and protect the livestock, and stone ovens for cooking and baking bread. Their social and religious customs added greatly to the rich diversity of the Hawai`i population of the 19th century.

The Portuguese who came to Kona were predominately dairy farmers. They brought with them the skills learned from generations of working with animals to produce milk and butter. Their skills as builders of stone walls were crucial in the process of taming the wild cattle to provide beef, hides and milk for these dairies. Fornos, or Portuguese ovens, were once found throughout the Hawaiian islands wherever the Portuguese congregated. Some fornos were communal and were utilized by entire communities, others belonged to a single family. Each week these wood burning ovens would be fired up to bake the family's supply of bread, the staple starch, and also some extra loaves for bartering or selling. The Portuguese brought with them expertise in growing and harvesting grapes for wine making and creating the familiar Portuguese sausage and flavorful smoked sausages such as linguica and chourico. They are, however, most known for introducing the ukulele and slack key guitar to Hawai`i.

Another defining characteristic of the Portuguese is a strong traditional family structure. From the beginning of the immigration period which lasted until 1913, Portuguese who were recruited by the plantations insisted that their families accompany them. Religion and the church played an important role in the upbringing of the children; at one of the dairies high in the mountains above Kona, Portuguese workers constructed a small chapel, so that the priest could make monthly visits to the family, thereby maintaining their contact with religion.

The Portuguese Bread Oven

The Kona Historical Society practices the traditional art of baking Portuguese bread in a large wood-fired forno, located in the pasture below the H.N. Greenwell Store museum. Every Thursday you can see staff and people from the community getting together to talk story, roll dough, and bake it. This particular stone oven is a communal oven and can hold over 30 loaves of bread at a time. An oven this large needs at least 5 hours of heating time, requiring a die-hard volunteer to light the fire inside it at 6:00AM. While the oven is heating, the dough is mixed, allowed to rise twice, rolled into seven balls ( a lucky number for the Portuguese), and placed into pans. The coals from the fire are removed from the oven before the bread is put in, so that it is the stored heat in the stones that bakes the bread. If you would like to like to bake your own Portuguese sweet bread, try using our recipe at home in your gas or electric oven ( and eliminate the seven hour heating and preparation time!)

A volunteer lays the brick.	Volunteers building the oven.
The oven sits in the lower pasture at the Kona Historical Society site at Kalukalu.	Community members gather on Thursdays to help roll the dough.

Stop by and learn how Portuguese immigrants used a stone oven for baking their sweet bread, Thursdays from 10 AM to 1 PM in the lower pasture.

Portuguese Sweet Bread (Pao Doce - Recipe Makes 4 loaves)
Mix together in a big bowl:		The freshly baked bread comes out of the oven in the afternoon.
Warm water	2 cups
Dry Yeast	4 pkg.
Then stir in:
Sugar	2 cups
Melted Butter	2 sticks
Eggs	4
Stir in- one cup at a time:
Bread flour	3 ¼ pounds or about 14 cups

When the dough is too difficult to stir, turn dough out on lightly floured table and knead in the rest of the flour for about 3-5 minutes. Add more flour if needed to keep the dough from sticking to the board. Put the dough back into the bowl and cover it until it has doubled in size (45 minutes-1 hour). Punch the dough down and divide it evenly into 4 loaves of dough. Pinch off 7 equal pieces of dough from each loaf, roll and place in greased 9-inch round aluminum pie pans. Cover the dough and let rise again until doubled. Bake in a medium hot oven (350-400 degrees) for about 30-40 minutes.