The Lighthouse Directory

Welcome to the Lighthouse Directory, which provides information and links for more than 9900 of the world's lighthouses. Latest update August 18, 2008. This week the pages for Colombia and for Northeastern Italy have been rewritten and expanded, with many new photos. Thanks to Agustí Duran Parra for several new photos from the Balearic Islands. The pages for Eastern Nova Scotia, Tunisia, the Stavanger Area of Norway, Scotland's Orkney Islands, and the Nagasaki Area of Japan have been revised and updated with new information, several new photos, and photo links. Last week Gordon Snyder contributed several new photos of lighthouses in Shandong province, China, and the pages for Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island, Panama, Libya, the Bergen Area of Norway, and Eastern Scotland were revised and updated with new information, several new photos, and photo links.

Faro di Jesolo
Faro di Jesolo, Venice, Northeastern Italy, August 2008
Creative Commons photo by Michael Kesler

Hot Lighthouse News:

  • August 16. New York State Parks has reopened Frenchman Island in Lake Oneida, the site of a historic lighthouse.
  • August 15. The Coast Guard has closed the Fort Gratiot lighthouse in Michigan due to concerns about its structural integrity.
  • August 7. Stabilization work at Alabama's endangered Sand Island Light is underway.
  • August 7. Managers of the Cape Enragé lighthouse in New Brunswick have proposed a plan to have the province take over the light station.
  • August 7. The U.S. National Park Service has selected Beacon Preservation, Inc., to receive the deed to the Penfield Reef Light in Connecticut.

Far de Ciutadela
Far de Ciutadela, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain
photo copyright Agustí Duran Parra; used by permission

About this site
The Lighthouse Directory is a tool for research and study concerning lighthouses and efforts to preserve those lighthouses. The Directory provides a brief compilation of basic data for each lighthouse with links to other reliable information available on the Internet. Listings now cover all of the world except for southern China; this gap will be closed in the coming months.

I'm glad to hear from site visitors, especially if you have lighthouse news or photos of rarely-visited lighthouses.

This site is hosted by my employer, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Searching the site: Many users have requested a search function, but I don't know of a search service that will work only inside a folder within a university site. If you're looking for a specific lighthouse and don't know exactly what page it is on, you can usually find it through Google by searching on two phrases inside quotes: "lighthouse directory" and "[put lighthouse name here]". For example, if you're looking for the Phare de Kermorvan in France, search on "lighthouse directory" and "kermorvan".

Faro de Santa Marta
Faro de Santa Marta, Colombia
photo copyright Capt. Peter Mosselberger; used by permission

What is a lighthouse?
It is not so easy to define exactly what we mean by a lighthouse, and various organizations and individuals have used very different definitions when describing or classifying lighthouses. Clearly, all lighthouses are lighted aids to navigation, but not all lighted aids are considered to be lighthouses.

Some definitions are not controversial. An aid to navigation is a structure placed on or near navigable water to provide visual guidance to mariners. A beacon is an aid to navigation that is fixed in place (that is, not floating). A lighted beacon or lightbeacon is a beacon displaying a light, while an unlit beacon is called a daybeacon. Often, a lighted beacon is simply called a light.

In this Directory, a lighthouse is a lightbeacon having a height of at least 4 meters (13 ft) and a cross-section, at the base, of at least 4 square meters (43 sq ft). This simple definition does not require that a lighthouse have any particular form or appearance. The structure of a lighthouse may be enclosed, partially enclosed, or completely open.

The Directory includes listings of certain lights and other sites of interest to lighthouse fans that aren't lighthouses by this definition. The titles of those listings are enclosed in square brackets [...]. In addition, lighthouses destroyed or demolished since 2000 continue to be listed; their names are preceded by a pound sign #.

Hoy Sound High Light
Hoy Sound High Light, Orkney Islands, Scotland, U.K., August 2003
Wikipedia Creative Commons photo by Richard Harvey

The lighthouse listings
Dates shown for lighthouses are the dates when the light was first displayed; this may be later than the construction date in some cases. A station establishment date, when listed, is the date when a light was first displayed at or near the same location. Data concerning the characteristics of lights comes mostly from the U.S. Coast Guard Light List for U.S. lighthouses and from the NGA List of Lights for lighthouses in other countries.

The focal plane of a light is the height above the surface of the water at which the light is displayed. A lantern of a lighthouse is a room or structure that actually encloses the light.

The heights of the lighthouse towers themselves should be considered approximate. Different sources use different methods for measuring tower heights, and those heights may actually change due to changes in ground level at the base of the tower.

I have attempted to determine whether lighthouse sites and towers are open to the public. This information is inferred from whatever sources may be available; it is certainly not guaranteed. Please let me know if this information, or any information in the Directory, is incorrect.

Lighthouse listings are marked with ratings of zero to four stars based on the extent to which the light station is open to visitors. Check the ratings key to interpret these ratings.

Mahdia Lighthouse
Phare de Mahdia, Tunisia, January 2006
Creative Commons photo by Gorik François

Articles about lighthouses:

Eigerøy Fyr
Eigerøy Fyr, Stavanger Area, Norway, June 2006
Wikipedia Creative Commons photo by Roar Johansen

Special Resources

George's Island Light
George's Island Light, Halifax, Eastern Nova Scotia, Canada, May 2007
Creative Commons photo by Geordie Lounsbury

Hutagami Lighthouse
Hutagami Light, Nagasaki Area, Japan
Japanese Coast Guard photo

Cape San Blas Light
Cape San Blas Light, Florida, U.S.A., September 2005
Creative Commons photo by Judy Baxter
Lighthouses of the Americas

Northeastern United States

Southeastern United States

Midwestern United States

Western United States and U.S. Pacific Territories

U.S. Caribbean

Canada

Bermuda and the West Indies

Mexico and Central America

South America and Antarctica

Lighthouses of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Australia, and Africa

Pacific Ocean

Australia

South Indian Ocean

Africa

Lighthouses of Europe

Britain and Ireland

France, Monaco and Switzerland

Spain and Portugal

Italy and Malta

Southeastern Europe

Northern Europe

Denmark, Faroes, and Iceland

Norway

Sweden

Lighthouses of Asia

Western and Central Asia

South and Southwest Asia

Southeast Asia

China and Taiwan (under construction)

Korea and Russian Far East

Japan

Yantai Light
Kongtongdao Light, Yantai, Shandong, China, June 2008
photo copyright Gordon Snyder Photography; used by permission

Regional, state, and local lighthouse preservation organizations are recognized on each state page. U.S. organizations interested in lighthouse preservation nationally are:

  • The American Lighthouse Foundation, based in Wells, Maine. ALF encourages preservation efforts throughout the country and holds preservation leases on more than a dozen New England lighthouses.
  • The United States Lighthouse Society, formerly based in San Francisco, has moved to the Point No Point Lighthouse in Hansville, Washington. USLHS has chapters active in the Chesapeake area, Long Island, Oregon, and Washington, and has been active in supporting preservation in other areas as well. The Society also publishes a respected journal, The Keeper's Log.

Lighthouses on the Internet: A Researcher's Guide has replaced the list of links formerly on this page.

Thanks to:

Hundreds of lighthouse fans around the world have enriched this site with their assistance, information, suggestions, and corrections. For a long time I tried to maintain a list of these many friends and contacts, but it has grown too long (and too out of date) to display here. However, I must extend special thanks to Jeremy D'Entremont, Michel Forand, Ted Sarah, and Klaus Huelse, who have followed the development of the Directory for years. Each of them has contributed information and support in vital ways, and the Directory would be much less useful without their participation.

Formalities

Written by:

Russ Rowlett, Director,
Center for Mathematics and Science Education
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

You are welcome to email the author (rowlett@email.unc.edu) with comments and suggestions.

All material in The Lighthouse Directory is copyright 2008 by Russ Rowlett and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Some images are presented by permission of their copyright holders, as noted under the image.

Permission is granted to copy portions of the Directory for personal use and study, but all other rights are reserved. You are welcome to make links to this page or to any page of the Directory, provided you credit the source and do not present the work as your own.

Please do not copy the contents of any page of the Directory to another site. This is an infringement of copyright, and it also deprives your users of the benefit of improvements and corrections made to the page.

The information contained in the directory is as accurate as I can make it; please notify me if you find any errors. Neither the author nor the University of North Carolina assumes any liability for uses made of the information presented by this web site.