An aerodynamic shape optimization technique has been developed for helicopter rotor blades in hover based on a continuous adjoint method on unstructured meshes. The Euler flow solver and the continuous adjoint sensitivity analysis were formulated on the rotating frame of reference for hovering rotor blades. In order to handle the repeated evaluation of the design cycle efficiently, the flow and adjoint solvers were parallelized using a domain decomposition strategy. A solution-adaptive mesh refinement technique was adopted for the accurate capturing of the tip vortex. Applications were made for the aerodynamic shape optimization of Caradonna-Tung rotor blades and UH60 rotor blades in hover. The results showed that the present method is an effective tool to determine optimum aerodynamic shapes of rotor blades requiring less torque while maintaining the desired thrust level.